Still Life
by Kuro Shi
Summary: Naruto returns with Sasuke, Sakura makes a grave mistake, Ino has a past. Plot by the ever patient "gof22". Finally updated with revised chapters.
1. Author's Note to the Readers

Note:

The following chapters have been redone. The story up to chapter 9 progresses to the point just before Naruto's initial surgery (maybe chapter 8 in the previous version of Still Life). Sorry it's taken so long, but the story had to change more than I expected. And it still isn't finished. In any case, I think the story has changed enough that fans of the previous version (if there are still any, it's been years, unfortunately) will enjoy reading it. Also, I think the quality has improved, though there are parts which I still feel aren't good enough (if you read something and think, 'well, this writing sucks', it's probable that I feel the same way, so don't feel bad about telling me so).

I can't promise very regular updates; as you've seen my promises don't really count for much. However, I'll do my best to put up _good_ chapters as quickly as I can.

I'm also working on the new version of No Turning Back; that also will probably not have very regular updates, but please look forward to it.


	2. Chapter 1

A wavering figure suddenly appeared in the fog, like a shadow on water. Naruto stopped and narrowed his eyes. Should he trust them? His eyes too often played tricks; they were as deceptive as his heart. His breath wheezed from his dry, open lips as the figure twitched, grew bigger, looming. Coming closer. He took a hesitant step forward and the body on his back shifted abruptly with what was maybe a groan.

The dark figure slipped from the trees to the ground, still advancing, and at some point Naruto blinked and realized that the blur had arms, legs, was a group of people. One of them spoke; he was sure it was his name that they shouted. His name meant home. He wanted to collapse. He wanted to smile. He couldn't do both at once. The weight on his back pulled at him and his grip on it weakened. It dropped but he kept his feet beneath him. If he fell, he might never get up again.

The body hit the ground with a thud, its arm pinned beneath its torso, and as fast as he could manage he turned and pressed his hand to its neck. It was difficult to feel for a heartbeat; his own blood rushed through him and his fingertips throbbed. His head ached when he brought his cheek down to rest near the body's mouth.

He imagined he felt breath, but his face had been numb for a long while.

A hand gripped his shoulder but the face above him was simply a blob of convoluted light and shadow, and he couldn't make out the words it spoke through the thundering blood in his ears. The hand tightened and all he knew was that it was something reassuring. Maybe, if he could hear it, it would bring tears to his eyes.

"Sasuke," he managed. His voice sounded abnormally loud. "...He needs a hospital..."

The blob turned away and Naruto's eyes slid blankly over the other figures there, so tall and blurred they seemed like trees; over the damp ground full of leaves like torn paper; over a pale face, half buried in the mud, mouth slack. Naruto thought he might have seen the Uchiha's eyes slip open, but he and the figure carrying him left so quickly, he couldn't know.

The hand was on his shoulder again, shaking him, wanting his attention. He was glad for its weight; he might disappear without it. That face: it had a mouth, eyes, a nose. It was a puzzle that he could fit together, if he could only concentrate enough.

"I just have to rest for a minute," he said, bringing his knees up. He felt his muscles tightening. Soon he'd be unable to move, if he sat here. He wanted so desperately to be home. "No, I have to get up..." He struggled to stand and Kakashi – suddenly from somewhere, maybe there the whole time, maybe the face – grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to his feet. "Sakura," he said, but whether Kakashi answered with any information, he wasn't sure.

* * *

It was 2:17 in the morning. Ino opened her eyes to the clock and stared, watching the seconds tick, before she realized the sound she was hearing wasn't in a dream, wasn't the sound of drumming fingers amplified through her kitchen table. She was alone in the house, it was night, and the comforting hum she'd been hearing wasn't a voice – just the buzzing of the fan that sat in the corner, turning weakly from left to right, left to right, and back.

She sat up and shifted her legs from the bed, listening, and after a moment, the knocking started again, louder. She stood, swiping her jacket from the floor. It was hard not to pause to look into the kitchen as she passed, even when she knew no one was in there. Reality was most confusing when she'd just woken. She opened the door and for a moment wondered if she was still asleep and having one of those twisted dreams that mimics reality, the kind that gives you false memories. Sakura stood there on the doorstep, breathing heavily and wearing her shirt backward and inside out. If this was a dream, maybe they _were_ in her kitchen after all, drinking and smoking and eating. Ino turned and stared back into the darkness of the hallway, but only for a second. Sakura's voice forced her eyes back to the front steps.

"Please, Ino," she panted. Her eyes were wide and their lashes drew strange creases on her face as she stood under the dying porch light. The bugs that littered the bulb cover, blocking the light, made her skin look mottled with grey. She swallowed and shut her eyes. "Come with me."

"With you where?" Ino came fully to her senses as the morning's cold air streamed in through the open door way. In the cold everything seemed so much more clear cut and immediate. "What happened?" There was a tightness growing at the base of her stomach. She pressed her palm against it, but her hand was ice and no comfort.

"The hospital." Sakura reached in and grabbed her tightly by the wrist. "Please. Naruto brought Sasuke back." She pronounced each of their names slowly, as if unused to saying them. "Naruto brought Sasuke back," she repeated, "and I think someone is dying." Tears were welling over the lower lids of her green eyes, and Ino, thinking back, realized she wasn't sure how long they'd been falling.

* * *

Naruto stared intently at the fingers of his left hand. They shook harder, the more he tried to keep them still. Finally he grasped them tightly and dropped both hands between his knees. He let his head slip slowly back. Maybe for a moment he fell asleep – he couldn't be sure. When he opened his eyes Kakashi was there.

"Why won't you let the doctors see you?" he asked, holding out a glass of water.

"I just need to rest." Naruto held his elbow tightly to his side and reached for the glass. "...I don't want to do anything until I know he's OK."

Kakashi put his gloved hands into his pockets. "Sakura is working on him."

Naruto lifted his head at the mention of her name. "Sakura?" He held his glass with both hands.

Kakashi nodded slightly. His eyes flickered over the younger man's bloodied form. He'd dropped his gaze to his water.

"I really had to do it," he said to the glass. "He would've killed me." He blinked, as if just recognizing the meaning of his own words.

Kakashi watched as Naruto tried to raise the water to his lips. His left hand shook as he drank. He drained the glass and with a gasp lowered it to the floor, sighing with relief.

"I'm so tired." He rubbed at his eyes, leaning over his knees. "What the hell is up with these lights?"

"Why won't you let the doctors see you?" Kakashi asked again, kneeling to pick up the empty glass. "You're bleeding all over your chair."

Naruto slowly straightened and carefully peeled his shirt away from his back. It came away with a quiet sucking sound, plastered with blood. He hung his head over his knees and listened to the blood pulse in his head. He felt weak, it was true, but he would live. Sasuke, though... He lifted his head and opened his eyes. "Sasuke got the worst of it." He took a breath and wiped at his face with both hands. "Sakura... Did she say anything to you?"

Kakashi had disappeared from the room. It took a moment for Naruto to realize. He wondered suddenly if he'd fallen asleep again as his voice died away in the emptiness. Maybe he hadn't even spoken, and the echo he heard was something he'd imagined. He opened his mouth, trying to stop the buzzing he was hearing. It didn't work. He was heavy and let his head loll, his chin rest on his chest. There was a smell like death. The hospital, or him?

"Uzumaki-san?" A nurse appeared at the doorway of the lounge. "Hatake-san asked me to--."

"I just need to rest." Naruto lifted his head. "Could you just give me some water and a rag?"

* * *

_I don't care how things turn out. I'll bring him back for you. _It was the last promise Naruto made to her, the one that each passing year seemed more and more likely to be the one that he wouldn't be able to keep.

"Wash this out and stitch it." Sakura blinked, trying to force the thoughts from her head. "How is his blood pressure?"

"There's a sudden drop, Haruno-san."

_You did it. _Sakura's jaw tightened. _ I can't believe you did it. _

"Are you alright?" Shizune briefly glanced at her from under her brows before returning her gaze to the angry red gash in the Uchiha's right arm.

"Yeah." Sakura sucked in her breath. "Why?"

"Hattori can take over for you if you need a second."

"I said I'm fine," she snapped. "You could stop distracting me, maybe. I'm trying to concentrate."

Shizune nodded once, eyes still on the wound. "OK."

Tears built steadily beneath her lids and Sakura blinked harder, dispelling the ache before it became overwhelming. Sasuke's eyes were now covered with a towel, but before then she'd seen, through his half open lids, the tiny bursts of blood dotting them. His lips, separated by clear tubing, formed tiny pink bubbles at their corners. Once upon a time, she'd kissed them. So far back in her life that it seemed like it might be part of someone else's memory. Even some of her memories of Naruto seemed like something she'd read, not something she'd lived herself. Naruto... The tightness grew in her throat, just thinking his name. No one had said anything about him.

Was he dead?

He couldn't be. He'd grown so much stronger, just in those few years; stronger than Sasuke could have known. But then, Sasuke was always improving. It was all he ever wanted to do - become better.

Sakura took a shuddering breath. She might have known that it would happen like this. The look on Naruto's face, his words on that one night were one of the few moments she had that hadn't gone fuzzy with time.

"Do you think I'm lying?" he'd asked. So close behind her she had to turn into the door to hide herself. No matter how often she told him "it's not what I want" their arguments always ended the same: "If you want him back, I'll bring him back. If it makes you happy... That's how much I love you. Do you get it?"

It wasn't what she wanted, she'd always said, but she didn't stop him when he left. Sakura slid a gloved hand into a slippery wound and wondered, was this a punishment for that selfishness?

* * *

Ino paced the width of the hallway outside the surgery ward, touching the wall at each pass, aimless. There was a coffee machine in the lobby further down the hall, but she didn't want to leave on the off chance that maybe being outside the door would somehow help Sakura, in spirit or something stupid like that. Pretending so made her feel better.

She brought her fingers to her mouth and chewed at the skin on her fingertips. She used to chew on her nails, secretly, and was trying to wean herself off the habit entirely, but it was slow going, especially now that she'd ceased to care whether her nails looked good or not. She glanced down at herself and the pajama pants she was wearing and realized her sandals didn't match. A voice called her:

"Ino..?"

There was a breathless moment in which she couldn't recognize the face in front of her. It seemed backwards, inside out. The open flesh beneath one eye caught the greenish florescent light and glistened wetly; everything was raw and still mottled with dirt. "Naruto?" she asked. A scab on the corner of his mouth opened as his lips moved.

"Did you come with Sakura?" he asked, speaking slowly, as if it was painful. Blood slipped quickly into the crevices of his lips and down his chin, streaming from the cracking scab on his mouth. He reached out and leaned on the wall, clasping a pink rag. When he touched it to his chin she realized it might have been white at one time. His face was a mess of pale red and rusted brown, stained in vertical patterns where blood had run from one place to another.

"Yeah." She nodded once, suddenly snapping to attention. She felt her brow crease as she stared at him, and the words suddenly left her. "You look terrible."

"I just have to rest," he said carefully. "It's nothing I can't handle."

"You aren't going to go home like that..." Her eyes flickered to each visible wound on his person; the odd bruise on his neck, the crooked fingers of his left hand. She might have stared for hours and not found an end to what was wrong with him.

"I want to wait for her, but..." He paused, shutting his eyes tightly. "There's a lounge there, right?" His chin lifted slightly.

"Hasn't a nurse seen you?" Ino took a hesitant toward him as he listed, leaning further into the wall. He suddenly began to move forward.

"I just need to rest," he mumbled. "Tell her I'm in the lounge." The back of his shirt shone with blood and Ino quickly looked away from it.

* * *

"His chakra seems slow, but that can be expected. Considering his remarkable healing ability, and keeping in mind that he knows his body better than you or I could... How am I supposed to usurp his right to refuse treatment?" The head nurse glanced briefly at Kakashi. "We're short staffed tonight. Most of our personnel are dealing with the Uchiha, who definitely was the more urgent of cases. If Naruto doesn't want treatment, why take people away from the more dire case?"

Kakashi tilted his head slightly. "He's unnaturally sluggish. Either he has severe internal injuries that warrant repair more than his visible injuries, or his energy has been so depleted that he's unable to heal properly. His system is already on overdrive." He lifted his eyes. "Kazuki-san, even if he doesn't want it, I think you should keep him overnight and at least--."

"Could you say again?" the nurse asked, pausing. She rifled through the papers in front of her. "I'm sorry, I got a little absorbed in this... I just missed the last few sentences." She glanced up, at Kakashi and then away before his mouth opened. "Oh," she whispered. "Is it done?"

A figure shifted in the periphery of Kakashi's vision and he turned. Sakura stood in the hallway in her pajamas, a hand pressed to the bloodstain on her shirt as if it were her own, and she were covering a wound. Her dull eyes scanned over him and fixed on the head nurse, who had frozen with her pen on the paper. "It's finished," she mumbled. "Have someone on call. I'm too tired to..." She trailed off and then suddenly began to speak again, as if she'd never stopped. "He isn't completely stable yet."

The older woman abruptly lifted her pen, touching briefly at the large ink stain she'd left. It obscured half of the word she previously written. "Go home and rest. I know it must have been hard for you. It was hard on all of us. I'm glad you were here, at least."

Sakura paused. "...Uzumaki Naruto..." She fisted her hands. "I... I haven't heard anything about him... I..." Her shoulders had started to shake and she seemed unable to stop them. Kakashi lifted his chin.

"Sakura," he called carefully. "He wanted to see you."

Her eyes flickered up to his, blinked. "Kakashi," she managed. "He's awake?"

The head nurse rustled her papers and struck them straight on her desk. "He's hurt of course, but not nearly as badly as the Uchiha. He's completely lucid and refusing care. All he needs is a few bandages and a good deal of rest." She looked up and pressed her lips into a soft smile. "You don't have to worry about him. He'll be good as new in a few days. This other one, though..." She took a breath. "It's a good thing you didn't accompany Tsunade."

Sakura stood, lips parted and hands dangling at her side. "All he needs are bandages?" she echoed.

Kakashi cleared his throat quietly, brow wrinkling. The woman had heard nothing that he said, had she? His eyes cut over to her, still intent on her paperwork, and he said, loudly, "He _says_ he's fine. He isn't, though." He glanced at the clock. It was ticking toward 5. "He should be in the lounge. He's out of it, so have patience with him. OK?" He put his hands in his pockets and turned toward her again.

The door was swinging shut. The hallway was empty.

* * *

He was tired but the Uchiha wouldn't stop thrashing. "Stop," he begged. He didn't. Not until Naruto thrust his head back into the ground once, twice, did Sasuke finally stop trying to free himself. He smiled, his teeth stained pink. "Serious about bringing me back, huh?" he wheezed. His face was growing red.

"I told you..." Naruto swallowed, catching his breath. "Your arm..."

"Broken." Sasuke managed, fighting for his breath. They lay for a moment, unmoving and Naruto watched the Uchiha blink, trying to hold onto consciousness.

"Sasuke." His voice was desperate, or maybe just tired. "I told her I'd bring you back."

He told her so, promised with those exact words because he knew that Sasuke was what she was thinking about when she got that strange stare. He watched the slump in her shoulders, the idle way she stared at the wall for seconds, minutes, before she blinked awake. He heard the intermittent clink of the dishes and silverware she washed; he saw her purse already beside the door and knew she'd leave early in the morning, and he couldn't keep his mouth shut.

"I'll bring Sasuke back."

She looked up at him with narrowed eyes, turning away from the sink. "What did you just say?" Her hand lifted, covered in soap, and shut off the water. Without its rushing, the room seemed infinitely more vacuous. He was hardly three feet from her. Why did it feel so much further?

"I told you before that I'd do it. You didn't believe me?" He shifted in the door way. "I'll bring him back, if you want him so much." He swallowed. "That's who you're thinking about, isn't it?"

Her shoulders tightened. In that moment she looked so bewildered by his words, he almost lost the will to say anything more. _What are you talking about?_ He heard the words before she said them, reflected in her wide eyes.

"Stop acting like that," he mumbled. "Are you really surprised I know?" Her gaze shifted across his face and he saw a dare grow unspoken in the hardening set of her slight jaw. Naruto stared at her mouth. "Do you see me when you look at me?" he asked. "Or do you always pretend that I'm him?"

Her lips parted. For a moment she seemed frozen. "You don't even know what you're talking about." Her voice snapped through the air, sharp and defensive. But she didn't say anything more, and in that moment the 'Ilove you's' were too glaringly transparent; the realization tightened some muscle in chest,pulled his shoulders in as if to prepare him for a blow.

"Tell me the truth," he said quietly. "I don't care. I'll do it if you ask me. Admit it."

"You're an idiot." She wiped her shaking hands on a dishtowel, tried to fold it, threw it onto the floor. "If you're going on with this I'm leaving." She didn't touch him as she slipped through the doorway and into the hall; she shrank into the door frame, pressed herself to the wall. Her annoyance rose in a blush on her cheeks.

"I want you to be happy," he said as she passed and she turned to face him, rolling her eyes, her hands in fists.

"What the fuck are you, a martyr?" she screamed. "Yeah, OK? I think about him all the time and I'm fucking sick of you!"

His dim reflection was just visible in her eyes. Her eyes. They were wide and always sad, no matter what he did. "Then why are you here?" he asked. It was hard to breathe. "What are you doing here?"

He watched the single tear that escaped her eye until it disappeared beneath her chin.

Naruto blinked, waking. The floor in front of him shifted in and out of focus as he stared down at it, blinking. For a moment he looked around for a clock, but the numbers looked wrong. Or he couldn't read them. He wiped at his face with the rag he still clutched, but it had gone dry and scratchy, smelled like things he didn't want to remember. He cast it into the chair beside him, opening his fingers with difficulty.

The lounge, lit with the sickly light of florescent bulbs, seemed eerily timeless. Maybe he'd been sitting there for years. Maybe he was still dreaming. He couldn't be sure. But it was pointless to wait up for her. He raised his eyes to the clock again. Would he be able to talk to her? He couldn't even read the time. And what would he say? She probably didn't want to see him at all.

He carefully drew himself up, stopping halfway to lean on the chair's arms as his vision went black. _I should eat, _he thought. But sleep seemed so much more inviting. He managed to stand and took an experimental step forward, stumbled out of the lounge, into the hallway, and through the doors of the hospital, eyes fixed carefully on his feet. Dragging himself home. This was not the reality he'd hoped for but somehow his weak legged, lonely return didn't upset him. The street was cool and empty, vast. The curb invited him to rest. Maybe he fell asleep, maybe he was awake. It was hard to tell the difference just then.

* * *

Sakura materialized in the hallway, holding her shirt in a tight fist and stared for a moment at the soup, spreading amoeba-like across the hospital tile and infiltrating the spaces beneath Ino's sandals. "Shit," Ino breathed. "You scared me." She stepped away from the puddle, glanced at the blood stain clasped in Sakura's hand, and cleared her throat. "Is Sasuke OK?"

Sakura flinched, blinked. "I did what I could. It looks like he'll hold on." Her green eyes scanned the upturned cup of ramen. "Was that for you?" Her gaze flickered upward.

"For Naruto..." Ino motioned with her head toward the lounge. "He looks pretty bad, so I thought..."

The corners of Sakura's mouth tightened. "Did he really?" She turned and Ino stared at her back as they slipped through the hallways, hurried. Their haste unsettled her as much as Sakura's voice drifting back, disembodied: "Nothing a bowl of ramen couldn't cure, I guess." She paused, putting her hand on the door frame, and together stared into the lounge after her. Ino's eyes roved the empty space a moment, registering nothing but absence.

* * *

What drew her toward his house, she didn't know. She hadn't been there in years, but it was easy to fall back into an old routine. She was at the hospital's east exit before she realized she'd been thinking about it. Ino was behind her, but she couldn't register whatever words she was saying. The night air was hot and sticky.

He was there, across the street. She could just make out his form, melting into the darkness.

For a while she had dreamed of their reunion, and it was never like this. She'd never, not a single time, dreamed that he would seriously try to kill the man he'd once called a brother. What had all the talk been in those arguments they had, the ones that became more and more frequent the longer they were together? Just jealous nonsense. Nearly unfounded suspicions. False words that, in the heat of the moment, were meant to hurt, to test boundaries. She'd never thought he would act on them.

She slowed as she drew closer. He laid on his side on the concrete, half in the street. She could smell him from where she stopped: blood, sweat, dirt. She said his name: "Naruto."

The voice cut through the eerie silence of something not quite a dream. His shoulder twitched and he sat up, slowly, painfully. A groan slipped from his mouth as he righted himself. "Sakura," he puffed. For a moment he stared up at her, trying to force her figure into focus. What bothered him upon waking was the confusion. He was suddenly hearing too many noises, thinking too many thoughts. He managed to catch her voice through the ringing in his ears but it was hard to make out her words. He tried, as hard as he could, to concentrate on her. She didn't look any different from when he left her, and her hair had been wet, and when she hugged him he almost thought that the reason her heart was beating so hard was because she was afraid for him. It took him a while to speak again, and as he caught at his breath his eyes zipped over what he knew was blood on her shirt front, though it seemed colourless, black, to him. "He isn't dead, is he?"

"Did you hate him that much?" The buzzing sea in his head opened around those words, swallowed them.

Did. Naruto struggled to string together his thoughts. Did. Past tense. Did. Dead. Sasuke was dead, then. Despair tried to distort his wooden face; he felt it rise against his eyes, twist at his mouth. Despair for a failed promise, a lost love, a dead friend.

Sakura watched him, the faraway look of the half smile that grew slowly on his ruined face. That smile. She didn't know what it meant. She wanted to slap it from his mouth. "Naruto! You tried to kill him!"

The blond lifted his eyes to hers. They were, infuriatingly, blank. He blinked slowly. "Dead..." His brow wrinkled slightly before abruptly smoothing, as if expression alone exhausted him. "Sasuke?"

"If he doesn't wake up..." Sakura stared at him, her jaw set, and the threats left her mind, scattered by anger. She expected something to spark in his eye, some kind of sadness to flash across his face, but nothing like that happened. It made her fists tremble. "Is this the whole reason you left? To hurt me? To kill him?"

Naruto frowned slowly. "I was thinking about you." His voice trailed off. His eyelids fluttered. "You know I was."

Tears rose behind her eyes like daggers. "His lung collapsed." She had to force the words out in a growl. Her throat was closing.

"Sakura..." Naruto whispered.

"His skull is fractured. And his face--." She swallowed quickly, trying to keep her throat from closing. It was becoming more difficult to speak, and she shouted the words. "Are you really going to say you did that for me? It was for yourself, you jealous fuck!"

Ino's hand was suddenly on her shoulder, a ghost out of the night. How long had she been standing there? Why was she there? Sakura shrugged her off, violently. "Maybe you should talk to him later," the blonde said. Her voice was too steady, too tempered, wooden as Naruto's face. Sakura couldn't pull her eyes from his face. His stupid, lying face.

"It was for yourself, admit it! You're nowhere near as hurt as he is, are you?" Tears were beginning to spill over onto her cheeks but she didn't want them to. Naruto's eyes had latched to them, the tears; they were what he wanted, after all. She spat at him but he wouldn't look away from her. Ino's voice droned in the background and she ignored it. "Was he even fighting back at the end?" When did you stop? When had you had enough?"

She could look so melancholy sometimes. Her face, though, right now, was dim, wavering, blurred. Her features, her expression on the day he left were so much clearer now, even if they were only a memory. Maybe he was dreaming now? He felt his breath grow shallower, quicker; his knees shook even though they bore no weight. Maybe, he thought, he would not make it even to the apartment stairs. Maybe he would just sleep here, in the street. He'd slept in worse places. Naruto dropped his head. It was dark, but were those teardrops on the asphalt between her feet? "You wanted me to bring him back," he managed. "I tried."

"I never said I wanted him back!" Sakura's eyes had widened. "Don't you dare even say–!"

"I only wanted him back because you did." Naruto's eyes fluttered closed just as her palm struck him. His head was already numb - he hardly felt it. There was a curious buzzing in his limbs. His ears felt as if they were full of water.

"You wanted him back because I did?" she shouted. "You tried to kill him! So was it better for you when he wasn't here?" Sakura tried to wipe her hand on her shirt but Ino had taken hold of it, tightly, in her own hands. "Things are getting too--" she started to say, but Sakura looked away from her. "That's why you did it, huh? Because I love him more than I love you? Did you think I would be happy about this?" Here was Naruto. Sleepy. Here was Naruto, and Sasuke laid in bed, swaddled and tubed and missing pieces. "You're going to bring him home dead and say you did it for me?" She screamed at him but the night muffled any echo.

Naruto wiped at his bleeding mouth. "I'm tired." He sank down against the curb, slouched. "Sakura," he said quietly. "I'm so tired."

"Why did you do this?" she asked, and Naruto was struck by the look on her face. There was some kind of misunderstanding; he'd said things he hadn't meant. He struggled to put a sentence together, to apologize, explain. All he could do at the moment was repeat the previous sentence.

"I never tried to kill him." Emotions must shut down before the body, because he felt numb and stiff. He knew he should be something – angry, or no, maybe he was more sad than angry – but it was too difficult to sort everything out in his head. He judged himself seconds from passing out, but even so his face tilted up toward her.

That look. Sometimes, she could have such a profound look of pain on her face, it broke his heart. He only wanted her to be happy. That's why he did it. To make her happy. Truly, truly happy. He dropped his heavy head, exhausted, and felt an ache skitter up his side and into his neck.

"I never tried to kill him," he said into his hands.

"Then how did he end up like he did?" Sakura leaned over him, grabbed him by the shoulders. "Is it because I don't care about you? I still don't! I don't give a damn about you! You... You make me sick!" She raised her fisted hand and felt Ino's arm encircle her and pull her away. Naruto lifted his head.

"Sakura," he whispered. "I never meant..." He broke off. "I don't care who you... I just... As long as you're happy..." He touched his hand to his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut.

"That happy shit again?" She grasped the corner of the blood-stained shirt she wore. "You're pathetic! I guess you can at least say you brought him back, huh? And that's all I asked, I guess, huh?" Her chin quivered and she quickly clenched her teeth together. "I would rather be unhappy with you all my life than have this happen," she said. "Did you hear me?"

Naruto wouldn't speak.

"I asked if you heard me!" The street was silent and she listened, straining, for his reply. But Ino's voice filled her ear instead, low and close.

"Look, I'll walk you home, OK, Sakura? It's been so long since you've seen each other and it's late, you guys can't talk about things like this. Someone's going to say something they don't mean." She took a breath, looking between the two. "Let's get Naruto a room, and you can talk tomorrow--."

"I just want to sleep. I just need to sleep." Naruto waved a hand over his head, drunkenly, weak at the wrist.

"Yeah, he can just sleep it off," Sakura mumbled malevolently. "He's tired after beating the shit out of one of the only people who ever cared enough to put up with his insecu--."

Ino tightened her grip, cutting off the words. "You're tired. Sakura, just go ask someone to bring a chair out here, OK? Naruto needs to be in the hospital. I don't care what either of you says." She'd seen Chouji like this once, practically incoherent, just before he died. Shikamaru, of course, had just never woken up. She watched Naruto lower his head, exhausted. Did Sakura think he could just sleep it off? That the Kyuubi was a cure-all? She bit her lip and frowned at the dark stain beside him on the curb. She wanted to say, "he needs to check in", but Sakura had pushed past her and shoved her backwards, already yelling again.

"Just say it. Say you did it for yourself." Naruto opened his eyes and found himself staring at Sakura's knees. She had skinned one of them, and he wondered doing what; grown women don't get skinned knees, do they? He forced himself, shakily, to his feet, wishing the air would manifest itself solid so he could pull himself up by it. When he stumbled, Sakura left her hands fisted at her sides, simply moving back, as if to allow him room to fall. "Naruto," she repeated. Her voice broke. "Answer me!"

"I did it for you," he said. "It was never about me." His eyes were at her feet now. They were in socks. Had she left her shoes in the hospital? One of them slid forward over the asphalt. Her fingers hardly touched him. He felt them distantly, as if he were drifting to sleep. The wind that rushed by his ears was muted and soft. He lifted his eyes and she was growing distant.

Ino moved too slowly. Her hand encircled his wrist just as he struck the ground. Cough. It was the last sound he made as he laid there, suddenly stopped and still. The only movement visible was that of his arm, which she held aloft still by the hand. "I think his head hit hard, Sakura." The asphalt was warm against her knees as she knelt beside him. She didn't like the new blood on his shirt, the unseeing eyes still visible through his half open lids. She hated to see someone lie so still. "Sakura!"

It only took a glance back for Ino to realize that the nurse, still in her socks, her hands locked over her mouth, wouldn't move; not to get help, not to help herself. She quickly climbed onto her feet. The hospital doors suddenly seemed far away. Maybe it was the dark, maybe the shock of seeing his body like it was. Sakura, when she looked back, still stood unmoving, her back straight and stiff, her eyes riveted.

Ino pushed through the doors because they didn't open fast enough but her haste didn't matter - the main desk was empty. For a moment the lone figure in the lobby was so still she thought time may have stopped. Everything was so empty, so dark. _How much of this_, she thought, _is real, and how much of it is something I'm only remembering?_ Everything was strange. She pressed her hand to her stomach to slow the spread of the uneasiness that grew there.

Then Kakashi spoke: "What's wrong?"

"Naruto." She lifted her arm to point to the exit. In the next moment she was alone and the air seemed to be thicker, harder to breathe. There were sounds of people talking and she hurried toward them, breathless.

* * *

Sakura didn't lift her head when he passed her, only leaned further over her knees. Kakashi looked away from her and to Naruto, who laid on his back, half in the street and half on the sidewalk, shallowly breathing. His blue eyes, half open, fixated on some invisible point in the distance. Kakashi laid a hand on his chest. What happened, he would ask, but as he stared at the top of her head, willing her to make eye contact, he knew she couldn't speak. Her arms tightened around her head; her fingers grasped at her neck. Her shoulders suddenly shook, as if she'd been struck, and she began to cry.

Naruto closed his eyes and groaned, his arm stiffening. Kakashi kept his hand pressed to his chest. "Don't get up," he said quietly. He stared intently at the hospital doors, turning his face from Sakura.

The sound of her weeping drew a chill up the length of his neck.


	3. Chapter 2

The clouds in the sky were a sickish green colour; he hadn't thought they ever really looked like that, except in paintings or movies. His heart beat in his ears. Sasuke was only a shadow against the background, back lit. Even so, Naruto could imagine the smirk he wore on his face, the blood that he wiped from the gash above his brow. "Promise," he spat. His teeth caught the light. "What a useless word."

The rushing in his ears was his own breath, ragged. "I'll bring you back dead," he panted. "I'll bring you back dead, if I have to!" Sasuke's shadowed face showed no emotion. The space between them disappeared in a blink; the Uchiha's jaw, under his bruised fist, felt solid but delicate, thin, something bird-like. The impact sent a narrow thread of pain up his fingers, through his hand, into his elbow. "Listen to me!" The words hung in the air for the split second it took Sasuke to retaliate. The hand was only on his chest for a moment. He saw it all as he was thrown back. That bloody face, the sky, the ground. Impact.

His eyes screwed themselves closed as he slid across the earth, the left side of his face dragging. Blood pounded in his ear. A kick, barely missing his head. Everything moved too quickly; it was getting too difficult to see. The punch he dodged was more luck than anything, more Sasuke's mistake than his own skills. Luck was what he needed. Naruto heard a hard exhalation – a cough as his palm sunk into Sasuke's stomach - in the brief moment that they were still close. In the next second the distance between them seemed vast again. Sasuke rolled up and leaned over his knees and Naruto watched him. His hand throbbed.

"Sakura," he started, stepping away. Maybe it was a bad idea. Maybe he should finish him off. Maybe talk wouldn't work. Still, he found himself stepping back, giving the Uchiha room to argue and fight. _I am, _he thought, _an idiot. _He blinked and felt the wound beneath his eye begin to weep a new stream of blood. _"_Sakura wants you to come home."

"Sakura, Sakura," Sasuke managed, his face pale. "Like a broken record." He lifted his head.

"Like you don't have feelings for her!" Naruto wanted to say more but there was already a hand on the back of his head, pushing him downward. His lungs seized with the shock of the blow to his back. It spread over his spine before becoming a sharp pain that buried itself in his shoulder. The ground came rapidly up and they landed heavily together - close enough that Naruto saw the worn soles on the Uchiha's shoes and had to shut his eyes against the earth thrown up. He came quickly to his feet, bringing a hand to the slice on his shoulder.

"Do you really think it's so strange," Sasuke asked him, standing, "that I don't? You were always in love with her, though." He wasn't smirking. As he shifted, a line of blood oozed from the surface of his knee and began to trek down his leg.

"She's my friend," Naruto answered. Maybe, if he were less tired, he could have managed to make the lie more convincing. He felt the muscles in his shoulders tightening against his will. He couldn't seem to come off guard. "She's my teammate. She's yours, too." He watched as Sasuke shook his head. The tie that held his hair had fallen out.

"She was," he clarified. He examined his knife as he spoke, then wiped the blood from it onto the already dirty bandages on his arm. "Was that the only reason you came for me? Because Sakura wanted it?"

He felt as if, after this, he would never be able to do anything but frown for the rest of his life. It was hard to remember what if felt like to relax, to maybe smile. He stared hard at Sasuke. Sasuke, who'd already been given so many chances, who'd had the opportunity to be happy and didn't take it, who always changed everything whenever he went away. "You don't care what you did to her."

Sasuke abruptly dropped his eyes and for a moment he contemplated the knife in his hand. "What I did to her?" His lips twitched into a brief smile, then tightened. "Is that worse than what she's done to you? You've always had this infantileneed to be appreciated. I hate that you want her so badly that you can't even see what she does to you." He lowered his head and his face was invisible again, dark. "Do you even have any ambitions anymore? Do you only have obsessions?"

"If anyone is obsessed, it's you. You--. She--." Naruto's throat tightened and he forced the words free. "She loves you. She just wants you home."

Sasuke's narrowed eyes were suddenly visible, dark above the sharp blade of his nose. "I used to think you were an idiot. I used to think you were simple, the decisions you made, the things you said, the stupid way you acted, and then I realized it was because of her, because she dictated everything you did. She still does."

"I'm here because she wants you back, yeah. But I care about you too. She thinks it's best if you were safe at home, and I agree with her." Naruto looked away. "Do you want me to go back without you to spite her? Is that what you're hoping for? To turn me against her, and let you go?" His jaw clenched. "You left her because you're still obsessed with Itachi. You're out here wasting your time with revenge. Do you think it's going to make everything better? It's not going to happen! Wake up!"

Sasuke was angry. It was there in the darkening of his face; Naruto could see it even from the corner of his eye, even in the coming twilight, even with the overcast skies. "If there's anyone who should be waking up here, it's you!" he shouted.

The air was heavy and humid. His breath hung in front of him, thick and invisible. Naruto rolled his eyes and the Uchiha's face darkened further as he spoke. "You talk like you aren't in love with her," he said. That was his heartbeat, throbbing in his chest, in the wound on his shoulder; and the one on his calf, on the back of his neck. His fatigue came across in heavier and heavier waves and Sasuke's stiff face, as if submerged in water, wavered in front of him. He took a breath but the air was too viscous to move through his lungs.

"You want me to tell you the truth?" Sasuke tilted his head. The knife he threw to the ground landed silently at his feet. "Once. I loved her once. But it was a mistake. She got in the way." He lowered her eyes. "You were always closer to me," he said suddenly. "We're alike. You aspire to something more." His black eyes shifted up. "I hate that you throw yourself away on her." His head tilted further, the lines of his face shifting into something hard again. "She doesn't even love you, does she?"

"Sakura's always supported me." Bland. Pathetic. Even as he spoke the words, Naruto knew them for what they were. Sasuke's face contorted, twisted by something like distaste and ridicule and pity.

"Shut up!" he spat. "You'd kill yourself for her, and she wouldn't care, would she?" The pressure of the air was heavy on Naruto's ears. He heard thunder rumble far off in the distance, and Sasuke's voice rose to combat it. "Look at where she sent you!" he continued, shouting. "How long have you been out here looking for me? How many times have you almost died? Do you think she cares?"

Naruto stared blankly back at him. Slowly, he raised his eyes to the sky. 27 times, he realized. 27 times, he'd almost died. 27 times in two and a half years. A flock of dark birds flew over head, fleeing the oncoming rain. The wind that pressed by was suddenly cold.

"Let me go," Sasuke said. "And when you get home, stay away from her. From Sakura. You'll waste all of your energy trying to suck up to her." He stepped back, as if following the birds. "I think," he said, "she'll be your downfall."

"I can't let you go." Naruto took didn't allow the gap between them to widen any further, and he saw the Uchiha's bruised jaw square, his eyes narrow. He bent and scooped his knife from the ground.

"If you try to take me back, I'm going to kill you. You think you'll become Hokage then?" His fingers were chapped and red over the handle, streaked with blood and dirt.

"I have to take you back." Naruto watched Sasuke's reddened fingers. They became waxy white as they tightened.

"What did she do," he asked, looking disgusted. "Let you kiss her? Let you sleep with her? You know that all stops if you take me back." He shifted, his chin lifting. The anger in his eyes made them luminous, larger. "Or _are_ you as stupid as I thought?" he asked. "She hasn't even done that and you're still her lackey? Are you?" His arm slipped up in a blur; his wrist flicked out. The knife Naruto dodged, but in the next instant Sasuke was upon him. There were words, something loud, shouted,but unintelligible.

His punch missed. The kick he aimed up at his chin didn't - Naruto didn't even see it coming and felt his teeth sink into his tongue as it struck . His eyes were veiled with dark hair. A blow to the head, the ribs. He struck out and his knuckles split on teeth, touched at an already bruised jaw, sharp and brittle-feeling. His fingers caught in a shirt and he ignored the grating in his hand, the bone on bone grit he could feel all the way to his elbow. The body he shoved into the ground, twisting. Sasuke cried out – bit off a shout - and slapped at the ground, trying to push himself away, but Naruto caught his struggling arm up in his good hand, pressed a bloodied arm to the pale neck beneath the swollen purple jaw. There was a crack and Sasuke's red-flecked eyes widened for the shortest moment. In the next second his lips tightened and he fought, jerking, to slip out of the hold.

Naruto felt the bone snap and sucked in his breath. "Stop!" He pushed the Uchiha's head into the ground and his tense figure went still, breathing heavily.

"So you are..." Sasuke's voice was strained. "...You're serious about bringing me back, huh?"

Naruto swallowed, catching his breath. "Your right arm..."

"Broken. Yeah." He stared up at the sky, eyes ticking back and forth, calculating.

"You... It wouldn't have been so bad if you hadn't tried..." He swallowed again, the blood from his tongue filling his mouth. "Sasuke," he said, "come home."

"You... You're gonna have to take me back dead." He smiled. "You die, or I die. Going to wrap me up for Sakura? Huh? So she can grab hold of me and you can admire her from afar?"

Naruto opened his mouth but the strike knocked his words from it; there was only pain and the sudden blackening of his sight. Sasuke slipped away from him, slipping away. Naruto grasped at his knee as it flickered by, felt the stickiness of broken skin. He staggered up, blinking to clear his vision. There were noises - Sasuke's retreating footsteps, his words. The meaning, though, was difficult to make out; the side of his head throbbed, full of hot blood, pouring its excess out over his eyes, through his mouth. There were flames somewhere, heat and a dry pain in his arm. Smoke invaded his nose and eyes.

No matter how much he tried, he couldn't wake up.

* * *

"Naruto..." Tsunade lifted an unbruised eyelid. His clear eye moved to the right and the left, sightlessly, as if he were watching something. "Look how much older you've gotten. You look even more like your dad." She put her hand on his head; his longer hair was matted and dirty with earth, blood, and sweat. "Just like your Dad," she sighed. Her eyes slipped down to the blisters on his arm.

The cuts and gashes on his body, even sewn together, looked terrible; raw and swollen. There was a slight burn on his chest and a more severe, but smaller one on his stomach. It upset her to know her nurses were the cause of that one, but at least the injury told her what she needed to know before any more damage was done: that the hara was damaged, exhausted; it had quit.

Without working chakra circulation, healing would be more difficult for him than it had ever been. Tsunade laid her hand on the side of his face. With its many scabbed abrasions, it was hot and swollen beneath her fingers. Recovery would be long and hard, but there was nothing she could do to help that. She saw his eyes move again. "What," she asked quietly, "are you dreaming about?"

She hoped it was of happier times.

* * *

The picture was so old. Without even looking at the mirror, she knew how much her face had changed. Her hair was short. She wore bangs over the forehead she'd hated to hide the wrinkles she was ashamed of - wrinkles, at her age. Slight ones, but wrinkles were wrinkles. _You can't even see them, _Ino had told her. _Especially in the light. Flourescents make everyone look like shit. _Really. Ino, even with her face as scarred as it was, managed to retain some semblance of beauty. Maybe that was personality, though. She'd never been the type to radiate, like Ino was. She tried, but that wasn't her. Maybe her passions didn't run as deep. Or maybe they ran too deeply.

Sakura slid her thumbs over the young faces in the photograph and took a shuddering breath. What, she wondered, do Naruto and Sasuke really look like, now? In her mind, the images of them were bloody and swollen, their skin discoloured. They looked more like corpses; she wanted to draw a sheet over those faces, replace them with something more familiar. Both of them she knew wore their hair longer now; she didn't like it. But that was all she'd really been able to tell. She hadn't even clearly seen their eyes, she realized. She stared hard at the photograph and couldn't imagine them looking the same; the picture was too young. Too bright. Their eyes didn't have enough of a past behind them.

She put the picture back beneath her clothes in her bureau and pressed her head into her hands. They were shaking; fatigue was the reason that came into her mind, but somewhere in the back of her head she knew it had only started after she touched him, after he fell. They shook as Kakashi walked her home. Maybe they shook in her sleep. She lifted her head and listened as a knock resounded in the hallway. The doorknob turned, footsteps in the hallway, a shutting door. She heard it all and had the strangest idea that it was Sasuke.

"Sakura?"

She recognized the voice, but somehow it was still a shock. _Of course it wouldn't be him, _she thought. _Of course he wouldn't come here. _She stood up and stepped out of her room, into the hallway. The shadow on the floor coming from the kitchen shifted and suddenly Ino became visible.

"Your door was open," she said, stepping back into the kitchen. "I just wanted to stop by before work and see... Are you doing OK?"

Sakura nodded, folding her arms. Her shaking hands trembled against her ribs and she tightened her arms over them. "I'm fine."

Ino brought her hand up to push her bangs from her face. "Have you heard anything from the hospital about either of them?" she asked and lowered herself into a chair. Her back was too straight, too formal. Sakura looked away.

"No." She leaned against the door frame and touched at the back of her neck. There was a tight knot there. As she turned her face down toward the floor a pain flared and raced to the top of her head.

"Everyone is already talking about it." Ino touched at the scar on her lip, eyes staring at the ceiling, as she spoke. "I don't know how it got around so quickly." She paused and dropped her hand. "Have you eaten breakfast?"

Sakura shrugged. "I don't have an appetite yet."

She nodded again. "It's hard for you..." she mumbled, almost to herself.

"Why would he do that?" Her house was cold and drafty, but it was the thought of the open wound on Sasuke's leg, the skin blown up and out, gaping, wide as a bowl, that made her shiver. She'd compared the image of that wound to Naruto's as she leaned against Kakashi last night, stumbling home. What justified the difference between them? "He's grown so much stronger... He didn't have to keep going... He beat up on him just to do it..."

Ino shuffled her feet. "That doesn't seem like something he would do..."

Sakura's eyes flickered to her and she straightened, unfolding her arms. "You don't know him like I do." She walked past but Ino didn't meet her gaze, just leaned her head against her hand, still staring at the ceiling. Her voice rang out as Sakura reached the front door and sat to pick up her shoes.

"Sakura," she called. "It's been years since you've seen him... You don't even know what happened out there..." Her voice grew closer. "Sasuke's not a lightweight. He would have put up a fight. Where are you going?"

She looked up as she pulled on her shoe. "I have to go out. I'm..." The phone rang once, abruptly. It was silent for a moment before it rang again, this time longer. She paused.

"Do you want me to get it?" Ino asked.

Sakura sighed and quickly pulled off the one shoe she'd managed to put on. "No, I'll..." Ino had already turned away and disappeared into the kitchen. "...get it," she finished.

In a moment she'd reappeared, holding the phone out at arm's length. Her back was too straight, too formal.

Tsunade was calling from her hospital office.

* * *

Naruto dreamt of drowning. Of being underwater and unable to swim to safety.

He'd stood and stared down at the water and looked across the mirrored surface. It was dotted with other swimmers, enjoying themselves. And so he'd jumped in and reached forward to pull himself through; he tried to swim. But his body froze.

His eyes roamed the space around him. It was empty now, save for himself and the bubbles escaping his mouth. His arms and legs trembled with exertion as he willed them to move. His breath was short and he was growing desperate. _ I don't even need to go forward, _he thought. _Just up. I just have to break the surface. _But his body refused to move. Everything was dark and blotchy, spattered paint on wet paper.

Sasuke had told him once that he dreamt in black and white. Kakashi crinkled his eye and said he didn't have dreams. "Maybe when I was little," he said. "But I don't remember them." When Naruto dreamt, though, he was always confused for the briefest moment when he woke to find out that the world wasn't as vibrant as it was in his dreams. Now, all he saw was dark, murky visions. He'd never dreamed like this before. His dreams had always been in the brightest colours.

He was tired of this dream, whatever it was. He wanted to breathe but couldn't. There were shapes moving there, in the darkness. He wasn't sure what they were. He just wanted to wake, more and more desperately. The real world, no matter how bad it was, could never be as terrifying as his worst dream.

* * *

Sakura came into the shop, reaching up to stop the tinny ringing of the bells. How annoying, that sound. When they were quiet, she flipped the sign on the door from OPEN, PLEASE COME IN AND WELCOME! to CLOSED, SO SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE! She turned the lock until it clicked.

"What's wrong?" Ino's voice, behind her, already sounded worried. Sakura's hands dropped from the door.

"Can we go to the back?" As she glanced up, stepping back, she was caught for a moment by the gazes of the three men whose portraits rested above the door, and she wondered how the remaining member of that cell could work beneath their eyes almost every day. She stared up at them until they blurred in her vision.

Ino watched her as she folded her apron into a small square, lining up its edge with the counter upon which she placed it. "Yeah," she said after a moment. "Come on." There was heaviness in her chest as she bent to shift the boxes in the storeroom, clearing an area. Sakura was slow in entering and Ino knew, watching her sit heavily, her knees drawn up, that things hadn't gotten better, that the dark premonition that pulled at her gut as she answered the phone was justified. She took a breath and cleared her throat. "What's wrong?"

"He's paralyzed." Sakura's voice was blunt and abrupt, the sound of something falling suddenly in an empty, noiseless room. "He's paralyzed and there's hardly any chance he'll ever walk again." Her finger traced a dizzy circle on her knee and she stared at it fixedly, not even looking up at the sudden intake of breath that Ino wasn't able to completely stop.

"You pushed him..." She only said the words because the event replayed instantly in her head, but she regretted them the instant Sakura's eyes lifted. For a moment she felt as if she were staring into a mirror.

"I know I pushed him!" The words were so forceful Sakura had to lean forward, as if propelling them out. "I know I did it!" She grasped Ino's knee in a desperate hand, tightening her fingers.

"I wasn't accusing you." Ino pressed her hand the one on her knee. "How bad is it?"

"Inoperable." Sakura jerked back, hands fisting on her thighs. "Practically inoperable."Her fingers opened and she dropped her head into cupped palm, bending over her knees.

It took Ino a moment to realize she was crying; it had started so quietly. She stood and sat close beside her, laying a hand on her back. When Shikamaru died, Sakura had spent the night beside her, running a hand over her back like a child's. She said "Everything will be OK" until sleep overcame them both. It was strange, the way positions had changed, the way things moved in circles. Sakura cried, and Ino found herself mumbling again and again, "Everything will be OK."

She wondered each time she repeated it if Sakura, too, had been lying when she said it.


	4. Chapter 3

* * *

"He'll wake up any day now." Tsunade crossed her arms tightly against the wind. The faces opposite her, carved in stone, were stark and sharp in the sunset. Kakashi, standing beside her, dropped his head slightly. It was he only sign he gave that he heard her, and she took in her breath, eyes fixing on Minato's face. "I don't know how I'm going to tell him."

Kakashi leaned against the balcony rail. "There's nothing you can do...?" His voice was flat and he spoke into his chest. He'd asked the question before, and knew the answer. He just couldn't help asking again.

"Even if I'd been there when it happened... I know he wasn't cared for properly, but considering his injury, it hardly makes a difference." Tsunade sighed. "If we can fix the hara, we might be able to do something about his paralysis. But he needs to get healthy first, and we need to develop some kind of plan of action. This kind of surgery hasn't been done manually in years..." She pursed her lips, peering into the distance before abruptly turning to face Kakashi. "Have you seen Sakura lately?"

He shook his head. "Not since I took her home." He lifted his head. "I told you how she was."

Stumbling, unable to speak. Tsunade nodded. "She wasn't much better when I told her his condition." That look that flashed across her face; as if she'd been sleeping and abruptly woken in a pool of ice water. When she closed her eyes and swayed Tsunade had reached out, certain she was going to fall, but instead she tripped back on uneasy feet, bowed haphazardly in the doorway, and disappeared.

"Well, they're very close..." Kakashi rubbed briefly at his chin.

"Of course." Tsunade glanced at him. "You say it like there was something else."

"Since after Sasuke left. The second time." He straightened, turning away from the wind, and pulled a hand through his hair. "So I heard."

She didn't doubt it. It had always been obvious that Naruto carried something for Sakura. When he was young he'd been like all boys are; so much stupider in her presence. And when he got older there was just something in his eyes; the way their corners crinkled when he smiled at her. Tsunade sighed and Kakashi shifted.

"He might do best hearing it from her." He crossed his arms. "If she can bring herself to do that." His gloved hand came up to rub at the back of his neck and Tsunade watched him turn his head stiffly.

"Are _you_ alright?" she asked.

He lifted his face and the corner of his visible eye bunched in a slight smile. "It's just hard to believe." His gaze shifted to the monument, his teacher's face, and Tsunade saw an almost unreadable sadness in the wrinkle of his brow.

* * *

Ino had never really learned how to make comfort foods. Her mother wasn't much for them. During the winter Sakura would bring hot thermoses of thick soup from home while Ino picked over something cold, something thrown together with ingredients straight from the fridge; salads without dressing, hard rice, cold chicken. The first thing she taught herself to make, when she left to live on her own, was rice pudding. Sakura always had it at least once a week in the coldest months, and she'd always wanted to ask to try it. Something about the way it smelled...

Her first attempt at making it was a complete failure, but by now she'd mastered it. Her bad days could be cured with a cup or bowl of it. She hoped Sakura would eat at least some of it. She'd slept the entire day, the dark shades of her apartment drawn as Ino wandered around inside, washing the few dishes in the sink, listening for calls. She expected once from Tsunade, but the phone had only rung once since she'd been there – Kiba's name had come up, and Hinata's faltering voice filtered over the answering machine. She hadn't been able to get in touch with Tsunade, and was wondering how Naruto was. She'd heard rumors that he'd come back into town a few days ago. The hospital wouldn't give her any information. "Sorry to bother you," she said quietly, before hanging up. "I'm just a little worried."

So was Ino. What would happen when--.

The knock at the door surprised her and the ladle she'd held loosely in her fingers splattered against the pudding in the pot. It began to sink as the knocking began again.

"Sakura." The voice penetrated the room as Ino fished the ladle from the pudding, burning her fingers. "Sakura?"

Tsunade.

* * *

His eyes moved under his lids occasionally. The left one was bruised and swollen shut, but the right one was slightly open and Sakura caught the smallest sliver of blue, sometimes, when she could bear to look at him. Her chest was knotted and her stomach fluttered strangely, the way that it does when you submerge yourself in water too hot, or when you wake up and, for the split moment, don't know where you are. She pressed her hand to her forehead and it felt feverish. Sweat welled in drops like pinpricks on her upper lip. Her eyes, as they stared down at her knees, were full of hot tears that, for some reason, couldn't fall.

Tsunade had appeared in her bedroom, sat on the mattress and put her hand on Sakura's hip. Her voice was soft but every word squeezed more breath out of Sakura's lungs, pressed her further into the bed, threatened to suffocate her. She was so caught up in what she was hearing, it wasn't until she felt Tsunade's fingers on her face that she realized she was crying.

We'd like you to tell him, she said. We know how close you are, she said. She said, He's really going to need you to stay by him. Be strong. He needs you.

How could she have done anything but nod her head and cry? Tsunade pulled her into her arms and she wept, her cheek pressed into her bare shoulder, arms limp. Ino stood in the doorway, shifting, but Sakura couldn't bring herself to look up at her. She stared down Tsunade's back and let the Hokage comfort her, misplace her sympathy. If she told the truth, she thought, things would become so much worse. She couldn't imagine the words leaving her mouth in Tsunade's presence: _I did it. I did this to him._ Looking at him now, though, knowing that he would wake and she would have to tell him he was paralyzed, she suddenly wished she'd confessed everything.

Naruto laid quietly in bed. His right eye, once slightly open, had closed. He looked older, somehow. The crease between his brow, the strange colour of his skin. He was too pale. Sakura imagined his eyes opening, washed out and bright, strange, like ice sunken into his face; she imagined the pain she would hear in his voice. Her shoulders tightened. "I can't do this," she whispered. His face was still, waxen. "Please," she whispered to him. Her hands settled on his blanket but she couldn't bring herself to touch him. "Please," she said. "Don't wake up..."

Ino's voice only half startled her. It wasn't so much that she'd forgotten the blonde had come with her; it was the soft tone, the way her voice fell to a whisper. "Sakura," she said quietly. "You don't want that..."

Sakura fisted her hands. It was true. She didn't want that.

* * *

He was disconcertingly quiet as he woke. Sakura had heard people wake screaming, had seen people holding broken conversations with someone they'd been dreaming of, someone not in the room. Things like that had disturbed her but now, beside Naruto, she realized she hated this eerie, suspenseful silence more. His eyes sometimes opened, moved about the room, or tried to, and then closed again. Each time Sakura held her breath, hoping he wouldn't fully wake. Hoping to put off her duty.

Ino sat beside the window, staring out. Sakura was glad for her presence, grateful for her understanding. Was it understanding, or just the obligation of friendship? Tsunade, standing beside her, wouldn't bother to politely veil her disappointment, no matter what bond they shared. _If Naruto says something..._ The thought continuously appeared in the back of Sakura's head. Even imagining made her stomach tighten and rise into her throat. Sasuke hadn't died, Naruto was more injured than she'd realized; she had no reason, no excuse, anymore, for what she'd done.

Sakura closed her eyes. She'd been staring at his face on and off for a good three hours, now, but, curiously, when she closed her eyes she couldn't seem to put his features together, past all the scrapes and bruises. The image that came up was one of him when they were younger, thirteen, fourteen, and he was asking her out on another date. They were such babies, then. Such kids. Once he'd brought her an ice cream and to spite him she'd held it in her hand, uneaten, until it melted and dripped sideways from the cone; he only smiled at her, awkwardly. She hated that smile, how obvious it made his feelings for her. But the week before he left he'd grabbed her wrists in his hands and screamed, inches from her face, with so much anger she wondered where that smile had gone. She would have loved to see it then, no matter how pitiful she'd thought it was before.

Why are you here? he'd shouted. If you don't love me, if you're just fucking with me, why are you here?

_I don't know, maybe I feel sorry for you. _That was her answer. Her stupid, childish answer. She'd pushed him, as if she hadn't known what she was doing, as if she couldn't control herself. Sakura pressed her fingers over her lids until lights, pixelated, grew in the darkness in front of her eyes.

"Mn," came the voice. "Sasuke's dead, then."

Sakura opened her eyes and looked, for some reason, first to Ino, who had torn her gaze from outside. Maybe, if Naruto hadn't spoken again, she would have simply continued to look everywhere in the room but him, searching for the source of that eerily disembodied voice.

"You're in my room," he said. He took a few breaths. "Not Sasuke's." His eyes slid halfway open and fixed on her, pale and bright. Sakura suppressed the shiver that up her spine to the base of her neck. She felt it prickle against her cheeks, like a sunburn, as she looked away from him.

"No," she said quietly. "No, he's fine."

"Then maybe I'M dead." Naruto laughed slightly. Even as the sound left his mouth he realized it didn't fit in the room, humid with tension. Tsunade and Ino stared rigidly at him, their backs straight. Something slow moving and dark rose up in the base of his stomach as he glanced at them, each in turn. He swallowed, wrinkling a brow at the pain he felt in his throat, the tightness in his chest. His eyes were dry and he fought to keep them open. He felt heavy. "So many people here to see me. Miss me much?"

Trying to smile made him hollow with fatigue; the scab at the corner of his mouth pulled tight, threatening to crack, with every word he formed. He had to act like this, though. It was the way he always acted. Tsunade smiled slightly at him in return, but Sakura stared down at her hands, one tightly gripping the other. When she pulled them apart to push her hair behind her ear, he watched the white marks deepen till they were red.

Something had happened last night. He remembered, but vaguely. She'd been crying, her shirt was dark with blood. He'd said some things, maybe, that weren't true. Or that were true but should have never been acknowledged. Maybe that was why she'd said what she did: _I don't give a damn about you. _It was the only thing he clearly recalled. Something told him more had been said, but all he saw were pictures, brief glimpses of movement: her hands, fingers spread, against his chest; her bare knees; her feet, without slippers; the sky, tilting as he fell. The way her green eyes pierced him even in the semi-darkness of early morning.

"I'm sorry for what I said," he said quietly, pulling his eyes away from her hands. She lifted her face and stared at him, lips parted. Her eyes seemed to large for her face, too surprised, too glassy with tears. She looked away without saying anything.

"Sakura..." Ino shifted in her chair and for a moment her voice surprised Naruto. He glanced first to Tsunade, still standing behind Sakura, and then to her. She held a pot on her knees, full of some flower he'd never seen before, or didn't remember seeing. "Are you OK?" she asked. She glanced between him and Sakura, sitting at his bedside. Had she been there, too, last night? He couldn't remember.

Sakura nodded. He heard her swallow and take in her breath. "Please don't apologize," she said. Her voice was small and tinny, as if he were hearing her through one of those can and string telephones, the kind he'd made when he was young. He'd tried to catch a cat and train it to meow into one side, because he had no one who wanted to pick up the other end and talk with him.

He was stupid when he was young.

"Please don't apologize," she said again. Her voice was so small. Naruto felt a pull in his stomach and swallowed.

"He's dead, isn't he?" He wanted to lift himself up, reach out to touch her - she sat so far away - but his body was too heavy.

"Sasuke's not dead," Tsunade said firmly. "You don't have to worry about him. He's grown more and more stable the past few days." Her hand settled on Sakura's shoulder, who seemed to sink beneath its weight.

"The past few days?" For a brief moment his torso washed hot; he felt breathless. "How long have I been here?" His hand lifted to his face. The stitches beneath his eye were hot; the left side of his face was swollen and tender. The scab on his mouth leaked something clear. He shifted his arm and knew the burns there weren't healed.

"5 days," she answered. He saw her head tilt, her brow wrinkle, and suddenly realized the heavy thing in his gut was dread.

"What's wrong?" He realized – remembered – that in this world he lived in, there was an infinite number of things that changed, degenerated, went wrong, sometimes in less than a second. Tsunade's eyes slid to Sakura and she lowered her head, her shoulders hunching. Her hands were motionless and pale, stiff on her knees. Naruto's eyes roamed the room, sensing the growing tension; it seemed to constrict his throat, something like panic. He swallowed, painfully. "What happened?"

"You're paralyzed," Sakura said suddenly. She exhaled as she spoke, features loosening, as if a sudden pressure had been released. Her shoulders slumped, her fingers curled. Tsunade and Ino, though, winced at the abruptness of her words. The room was sucked free of air. Naruto felt it. His mouth opened but it took him a moment to inhale. Her words were large and ungainly, awkward in his ears. "When you fell." Her eyes searched his, skittering back and forth, and a chill rolled up from the center of Naruto's spine. "When you fell," she said again. He felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle.

"You can leave," he said quietly, the words scraping in his throat. He wanted to say something biting, something dark and ugly but there wasn't enough breath in his chest.

Sakura's eyes blinked, twice in succession and then again as she spoke: "What?" He saw her chest sink, saw colour rise into her pale cheeks, and knew she'd exhaled in relief, knew she was flush with the joy of not being caught. His heart seized in his chest.

Tsunade was quick to touch him as soon as he grit his teeth, pushing himself upright. His legs laid heavy on the mattress, unmoving; his elbows shook as he struggled into sitting position.

"Don't..." She pressed her hand to his forearm. "Stop. Don't overexert yourself."

His face was growing red; he felt his heartbeat in the swollen skin around his eye. Sakura stood slowly, her hands shaking at her sides.

"Naruto--." She started. "Please, don't--."

"Shut up!" The word exploded from his mouth as his elbow gave out. Everything was so heavy in him. Don't what, he wanted to ask. Don't tell? "Sakura, get out!"

She shifted, her hands grasping at the loose material of her tunic. "Please don't sit up," she whispered. "You might make it worse."

"And how bad is it now?" He collapsed back onto the mattress, one elbow folded beneath himself, and a stiff pain radiated up into his shoulder blades. "How bad is it now? Since I _fell_?"

Sakura's throat tightened as she swallowed, tripping back. Even now, he saw it in her eyes: _please don't tell. Don't tell on me. _

"Get out!" he screamed.

Ino, in the corner of the room, suddenly stood. "These flowers," she started. She came quickly to his bedside, holding them in her outstretched arms. "They're scarlet geraniums," she said. "They--."

"Don't," Sakura began. Naruto stared at her, couldn't take his eyes from her. She looked away as his bandaged hand lifted, jumped as he grasped the flowers in his fist. Ino said nothing, unflinching, as the pot shattered against the floor, throwing dirt up onto her legs. Her hands, still outstretched, slowly dropped.

Tsunade was speaking to him, loudly, but he couldn't make out the words.


	5. Chapter 4

"Tell me this again," he said. She didn't want to. It was the last thing she wanted to do. "Tell me again."

He did, he did look like his father. Now that he'd grown up, stretched out. Now that all of the roundness in him had changed to angles. But the darkness in his face, the way the right corner of his mouth twisted into a wry turn that was a smile but not a smile; the grim, stark nature of his features now didn't suit him, was horrifying, even, but Tsunade wouldn't allow herself to look away from him and his stone-like expression.

"Tell me."

"You've exhausted the hara. It worked too hard and shut down, just like any organ would. We would be able to fix that, but your fall dislocated several vertebrae in your spine, disrupting your spinal cord. The assumption made by nurses was that it was your head that had been injured, and unfortunately your spinal cord remained compressed for some time after you were brought back into the hospital." Tsunade exhaled. She'd told him twice already, maybe in more words; each time she found herself cutting out more and more of the fluff that she hoped would protect him from her meaning. Soon there would be nothing left to cut out, and the only words she would be able to muster would be "Your hara is defunct, and you're paralyzed."

"Tell me again why you can't do anything about it." Naruto stared at the wall ahead, as he had been, his profile sharp and distinct against her eyes.

"We could shock your system into pumping chakra again, but the hara is too close to your spinal injury. We couldn't risk the very probable damage. But without the ability to use chakra to heal you, your injury becomes more difficult to operate upon." She stared at his visible eye, swollen halfway closed. The stitches in his cheek were garish, cartoon-like in their colour; bright red and waxy yellow. "Our most accomplished surgeons haven't used traditional means to operate on the spine in years. It's too risky in comparison to using the chakra lines already present within the body. It's fallen out of favour. No one specializes in operations like that anymore."

Tsunade finally dropped her eyes, her lungs completely expelling the air within her, as if she were being pressed. The room seemed old and stale and she hated to inhale again, knowing she'd fill herself with regret, fear, anger; all the emotions residual in the air, like a poison.

"So I'm stuck," Naruto said quietly. "Like this."

Tsunade reluctantly took in her breath.

"Baa-chan.."

Somehow, he sounded familiar. The slightly keening, musical way the words slipped into the air, the whisper of sadness behind them; it seemed familiar to her, more familiar than the mechanical voice she'd been hearing. He'd never sounded so desperate to her, but even so, he was more like the Naruto she'd known. She looked at him and his face, painted with sadness, was suddenly softer, younger, more like his own.

"Baa-chan." His voice broke. "Will I really not walk?"

Tsunade sat beside him on the bed and touched her hand to his leg. It was a stupid thing to do, something automatic; she was too tired, emotionally, maybe, to think ahead and stop herself. She touched her hand to his leg and his eyes clung to it, blue and electrifying; concentrating, she knew. Concentrating, and hoping to conjure up some feeling, _any feeling. _She took her hand away and instead pressed it to the hand that clutched at the bed covers, stiff like a board. "We can try," she said softly. "I know you can try."

His eyes had suddenly become shadowed. Maybe his lashes fell over them, darkening them. Maybe the tears that grew behind them had extinguished the light she'd just seen. His face grew hard again, his eyes grew harder, and Tsunade had to flee the room before his depression crushed her, too.

In coming days, weeks, she could tell him, you have to move. You have to eat. Here's your chair, try it. But more and more she saw the hardening in his eyes. She knew she had to get him out.

The day that he slept, unwaking, unmoving, his food tray untouched by his bed, she'd canceled her evening appointments to pay a visit to Sakura. At midnight she was at Kakashi's door. "It's best for him," she said. "We'll clean out his apartment tomorrow."

* * *

Kakashi had heard everything. That he wasn't eating, wouldn't sit up, didn't make small talk with the nurses who came to check his heels for pressure sores, who adjusted the drips at his side, who pulled away his bandages when he, on the surface, had healed. _There must be a surgery for it, I know, we could prepare, try for it in 6 months_, Tsunade had said. _If only he would try to eat, try to exercise. He's wasting away. _

Kakashi had paced the halls of the hospital before, but hadn't been able bring himself to enter his room, see for himself the state he was in. Lately Tsunade only had to lower her eyes, twist the corner of her lip, for him to know that nothing had changed. He caught Sakura in the hall, asked her to see him, to talk to him – they were so close, couldn't she..? Maybe..? But her eyes only filled with glassy tears as she stared at him, and after a while he couldn't bear to bring himself to ask her to do something so obviously painful anymore. Tsunade said Naruto chased her from his room with curses, refused to let her enter anymore, humiliated by his injury maybe. Maybe furious at fate. Things would be better when they were alone, had time to talk it out; staying with the person who cared for him most, Tsunade said, would help. The hospital didn't. Nurses said he stared angrily at the ceiling, impassively at the ceiling, sadly at the ceiling.

Sasuke hadn't woken. Not for another month, Tsunade had said. The other day his room had been full of nurses and doctors, alerted when he started coughing up blood, his skin pale and his sheets wet with sweat. Fluid in the lung they said. He slept, looking slack and unbothered by the flurry of attention around him.

Kakashi told Naruto as much when he finally developed a script, in his head. There was therapy to talk about. His new apartment. The wheelchair he refused to sit in. But somehow the wry, empty smile, the curt, dark answers put him off, and part way through his monologue he'd faltered, before even reaching any of the core issues. The careful wording he'd devised seemed stupid, pointless, and distant. They'd known each other too long. Naruto could see right through him, he knew, so he didn't even try to hide the worry, the concern. He didn't attempt to double-talk. But he couldn't bring himself to be frank, either. The situation called for a delicacy that their intimacy couldn't allow. He laced his fingers together, leaning on his knees. "You're wounds are better."

"Are they." Naruto blinked at the ceiling.

"Aren't you well enough for therapy yet?"

"Therapy for what?"

"Ah." It was all he could think to say. Their dialogue was broken and Kakashi stared down at his hands for a silent minute. "You have a new apartment. A double."

"Double." Naruto spoke without interest.

"The doors are wide. You'll have no trouble moving around."

"Hm." Another non-word. Kakashi stood in the silence, his sigh inaudible.

"It's not that great a neighborhood, but you'll be able to move back, if you want, when you can walk again," he said, opening the door. He offered it as an encouragement, tentatively, knowing Naruto would refuse it. He did, with a hollow laugh. The sound that came from his mouth was empty and fell like a hush in the room.

* * *

Ino was with Sakura again; it was the least she could do. She'd cried convulsively into her pillow but now she slept beneath Ino's hand, which reflexively patted against her shoulder. Poor Sakura, she thought, staring at the clouds through the window. They were shapeless today. She couldn't see anything within them.

Sakura's suitcase laid half open on the bedroom floor, disheveled looking, as if she'd been forced to pack it, as if her hands shook and someone had stood over her, screaming, ready to spirit her away. Maybe the truth wasn't far from that. Tsunade had told her of the apartments; the double on the ground floor which would be inhabited on one side by Naruto, and on the other, by her. Her, the one closest to Naruto. The one who could most motivate him, break him out of his stubborn refusal to try to live. _He needs love now_, Tsunade had said. _We all love him, but not like you do._ And Sakura could only stand and nod, paralyzed by her lie, forced into a corner by her deception. _You're right, _is all she could say, even though the truth was so much further from that.

"I don't want to go," she'd wept, as soon as Ino appeared in the doorway. She put her head in her hands. "I don't want to be with him!" And as she laid in bed, fingers combing through her hair, she'd asked, listlessly, "do you think he hates me?" Ino, sitting beside her, paused for the merest fraction of a second. Her comforting fingers twitched.

"He might," she said softly. She'd learned long ago that it was pointless to lie. To herself, or anyone else.

* * *

They could bring a breakfast but he didn't have the stomach for it. Appetite had abandoned him. Shizune could stand at his side and crack jokes but they only elicited a slight fluttering in his ribcage, something like nervousness or the fright he felt so often when he was young and stupid and in the dark. He didn't get hungry. Mostly he just felt more empty. Sometimes he'd suddenly grow hot with anger; his teeth would grit, sweat broke out across his forehead. Sometimes his chest would fill with something thick and immovable and it was all he could do to keep from weeping. More than anger or sadness, though, it was emptiness.

Maybe he couldn't choose which emotion was most fitting yet.

The footsteps stopped outside his door and the knob turned. They could bring breakfast but he didn't have the stomach for it. He stared at the door as it opened, but it wasn't a nurse with a tray; Tsunade entered, pushing a wheelchair in front of herself. It shone under the fluorescents, slightly yellow, slightly green. It drew his eyes immediately, as if on a line. There was a fluttering in his ribcage and he took a shuddering breath.

* * *

For the fact that dawn was only just now breaking, he was grateful. The streets were dead. He was too weak to push himself – "I thought so", Tsunade had said – and now he was being carted through the town like produce, like the ice cream he'd been too poor to buy as a child.

They went up some small streets, not often frequented by him, and finally came to a long, squat white building. Someone had graffiti-ed the narrow alley's wall with red paint - he couldn't read it. His eyes slid to the long flight of concrete steps in front of the building beside the alley. He looked up at them and that strange laugh welled up inside of him, dry and empty. "Nice place Kakashi picked out," he said. "Very hospitable to cripples like me."

"You aren't a cripple." Tsunade began to walk again, past the dingy windows and down into the neighboring alley. They came to a ramp, leading to a door in the back, and she pushed him up, silently.

"Ah," he said, craning his neck to look at her. "So it is cripple friendly."

* * *

Sakura stood up when she heard a distant clack. The halls here were wide, she already knew, and echoed like caverns. Her breathing seemed heavy and scared when she had walked down it, stopping in front of her room. Now, she heard Tsunade's heels easily. Did her footsteps seem so loud because the walls were thin, or because fear had suddenly flushed up under her skin and heightened every sense?

She stood, and when she heard the jangle of keys outside she opened the door. Her eyes were somehow drawn to Naruto's instantly, shifting downward and locking there. They widened for the smallest second, blue, before they became dark, as if a shadow suddenly loomed over him in the hallway.

"I'm glad you're already here, Sakura," Tsunade smiled but the smile was watered with her obvious relief. She pushed Naruto in and Sakura, looking away, stepped aside and closed the door. The room was suddenly like a coffin; the air was dusty and everything seemed dark, tight, humid. She stumbled into the kitchen and opened the fridge, pulled the pitcher of lemonade free from it. He'd always loved lemonade. She shakily poured a glass as Tsunade spoke quietly in the living room. Sakura's heart beat too loudly in her ears for her to hear anything but murmuring. Her hands trembled as she picked the glass up, holding it extended already, already offering it.

Tsunade straightened and Naruto looked away from her and to the window. There was nothing there but concrete, ugly and black and grey, water stained; dingy curtains in the windows. It was close to the hospital, though. The doors were wide. Tsunade was walking away.

"Tsunade!" Sakura narrowly veiled the desperation in her voice. Naruto's head swiveled toward her and she knew he saw through her. Her hand tightened. Ice clinked noisily on the glass. Tsunade only paused in the doorway.

"I'm sorry I have to leave so early. I'll be back in the evening."

Sakura took advantage of the moment to thrust the glass toward Naruto, shaking. Her damn hands, they wouldn't stop. He would accept the glass with Tsunade here, she thought.

He did.

In the hallway she attempted to delay Tsunade as long as possible, asking stupid questions, ones she already knew the answers to. It was with reluctance that she retreated back into the room with Naruto. He still held the glass outstretched in his hand, as if he wanted it far from him. "Do me a favour," he said flatly.

Relief made her loose and her voice trembled uncontrollably as she answered: "Yes..?" He hadn't said anything. Again. Why didn't he tell?

"Look out at the street for me."

His voice was so flat. So unlike him. But maybe she hardly remembered what he was really like. Maybe she'd destroyed him. She looked out the window and felt a flare of heat in the pit of her stomach as the thought crossed through her mind. She'd destroyed him. Just as she'd destroyed Sasuke.

"Do you see Tsunade?" Naruto asked.

She was a slight figure in the distance. The air was pink with early morning light. "Hardly."

Naruto waited a moment. She saw his reflection in the glass, arm still outstretched. "Now?"

"Now what?" She swallowed. She'd destroyed him. She hadn't asked him to be so close to her though. She tried to push him away, but everyone wanted to throw them together. Didn't she have a choice in any of it?

"Where is she now?" His voice took on a hard edge, a bite; anger.

"I can't see her anymore." She felt more dread the further Tsunade moved away, and she stood staring out the window, trying to gather herself and her thoughts. Apologies weren't enough for what they'd done to each other, but didn't they offer something? "Naruto," she began, turning. She faltered when she raised her eyes to him. He held his glass at shoulder level now, out above the floor.

She'd bought the glass set years ago, when she was just moving into her own place. Naruto was with her, and threw in a couple dollars when she didn't have enough, but desperately wanted _that_ set - the one with little smiling lemon wedges dancing around the bases. Despite how childish they were, she still liked them. She hadn't replaced them over the years. She hadn't broken one. Sakura stared at him and said nothing more. She knew already. Even so, she flinched at the sound of breaking glass. It shattered spectacularly - no surprise, it had been so delicate. Some pieces seemed to turn completely to dust, fine enough to breathe. What, she wondered, would happen if she breathed deeply?

"Why are you here?" he asked.

Sakura drew her shoulders up but said nothing.

"Did you think that this would somehow erase everything you've done to me?" His voice rose to a louder volume, and Sakura briefly thought about the neighbors before realizing there was no one on this floor but the two of them. Unless the floor was thin enough for sound to penetrate it, no one heard anything. His voice would echo through the hall until it grew too faint to hear. "You've always done that," he continued. "You've always tried to make yourself feel better after you screw up. You always turn yourself into the victim."

Sakura opened her mouth to say "I'm sorry" and by the prickle against her cheeks she knew she was no longer hiding the desperation she felt.

"Always making yourself a martyr." Naruto watched the naked emotion that bloomed in her face. She wanted to get away, now that Tsunade was gone and she didn't have to pretend. Her mouth opened several times without sound before words finally came out.

"Naruto, I'm not doing this because– Naruto, I just want to help you–."

"_Help_ me, you say. Take care of me or something, yeah?" He hated the way she was looking at him. Only a short while ago, it seemed, that look made him want to protect her with all of his heart. Now, it made him want to punch her. "_Now _you want to be around me. _Now _you want to move in with me."

"Naruto..." Sakura held her arms very straight at her sides. "...This is worse than anything I've ever done in the past... Please... don't bring that stuff up. You know why I didn't..."

"I'll say it's worse," Naruto interrupted her loudly. "He told me you would do this to me. He told me you'd never given a shit, and he was right!" Anger gave him the strength to push himself back in his chair, toward the door Tsunade had earlier named as his bedroom. "You never cared about me like I cared about you. I was just something for you to fall back on, and when you didn't need me I couldn't matter less."

Sakura's face: wide-eyed, an obvious plea for forgiveness plastered onto her open mouth, her upturned brows. She hated to feel badly about herself. She quickly begged pardon. She fished tirelessly for support and compliments. She came to him when she wanted to feel good about herself, because... Because? Because he was more pathetic than her? He wanted her to see herself as he saw her now; he wanted her to hate herself as he hated her.

The words were building up behind his lips and tangling themselves, though. That face made him tongue-tied: her open eyes, the parted lips, the transparent tears on her pale cheeks, visible in flashes when she shook her head; the fluttering in her throat, as if there was something she had to say when all she had were empty words. "Fuck," he screamed. "I can't even stand to _look _at you!" The words hung longer in the air than the slamming of his door.

* * *

It wasn't unusual for Sakura to lie awake at night and watch the memories play of her day, her life, replay on the ceiling. When she was young, she'd lie awake thinking about how unpopular and ugly she was, and she'd imagine herself some kind of Cinderella, some human Ugly Duckling. Later she stayed up pondering her weakness, so garishly apparent when Naruto and Sasuke were her teammates, Kakashi her teacher. For many nights, she stayed up wondering what more she could have done to keep Sasuke from leaving and seeing each goodbye – both of them, no matter how much less poetic his second leaving was – play through her head.

These nights, she stayed up thinking only of Naruto. He refused to leave his room in her presence; he never spoke to her; he ate sluggishly; he sat dully and ignored the nurses' attempts to convince him to exercise. Tsunade's face grew more baffled every day. "I thought it would be good for him," she muttered to Shizune, to Kakashi, and her brow creased. "They've always been so intimate." And she would glance over to them, sitting on opposite sides of the room and Naruto's hands like claws on the armrest of his chair. Each glance – and they came more and more frequently as days turned to weeks -- sent a shiver of fear up Sakura's spine: fear of detection, of revile.

Fears for herself.

Sakura sat in bed and stared at the ceiling, and shame burned in her face, brought a mist-like sweat prickling to her forehead. She couldn't be like he said she was. And if she was... she had to change herself.

In the hospital she stood as if petrified, and Tsunade frowned over Naruto's readings, measurements; so many numbers and none of them good. She sighed, stared up at his face, but he kept his attention on the window until she stood, the papers noisy in her hands, and spoke: "why are you doing this?"

For a moment Sakura imagined him turning to her, and his face would be contorted with quiet rage, his eyes so deep they were black; and Tsunade would understand that stare, that gaze. But Naruto's hands only tightened into fists on his lap. He stared out the window and said nothing.

He never said anything.


	6. Chapter 5

* * *

Was it a month that passed? It was hard to tell. Things ran together when all he did was sit, sleep, eat. The exercises each day at the hospital seemed one amorphous and hazy event; he wasn't sure how many times he'd been, only sure that he never tried and every exercise looked the same, anyway.

He saw people from time to time. Iruka came by with his son, a boy Naruto knew but could hardly recognize; but Naruto refused the invite to eat out, to come over. "My mobility is limited," he said with a slight smile, and Iruka looked away, unsure of what to answer.

Hinata came by once, but he didn't like seeing her or the noticeable bump beneath her shirt. How could she remind him of the past and force his thoughts to the future at the same time? She blushed and twisted the ring on her finger when he asked her how far along she was. She tried to talk about happy things but that always led to the past; did he remember when they went hiking, she started and then stopped when she saw his face. Did he remember that time that they were running late for...? It was a fairly nice day out, did he want to go out for a walk with her and maybe...?

Eventually all she had left to say was, "I missed you." And the day she said, "I'll love you no matter who you are, as long as you try" was the day he told her he was tired of that fucking word, "try", and that was the day she said "you used to be such a beautiful person, and was the last day he'd seen her.

Gai and Lee came once, but they were hard to tolerate. _Try _was their message. Gai cried for the "momentary loss of" his youth. "But difficult times are often the most memorable, the most nostalgic, when we're looking back on them finally from a place of achievement," Lee amended. They brought a noodle dish from his favourite restaurant (by now everyone knew that he didn't go out anymore ); he upended it onto the floor.

Kakashi lived in the hospital. He traveled between Sasuke's room, Sakura's desk and Tsunade's. When Naruto looked up from the window, content to stare instead of exercise, he might be there, elbows on his knees or hands in his pockets. Where were the books for which he was so famous for reading, no matter how many times he'd read them before? Naruto hadn't seem them lately.

Tsunade hovered around, prodding, measuring, weighing, listening, sighing. "Don't give up," she told him often. "Why are you giving up?" Recently she told him Sasuke was waking. "Think of how you'll look to him," she said, and he wondered what angle she was trying to reach. It wasn't as if Sasuke had ever thought much of him anyway.

Sakura. Her presence was a heavy mass above him everyday. Ino tried to take her out but she wouldn't leave him alone. Ino tried to convince her to leave but she wouldn't leave him alone. She never left him alone. She never stopped trying to talk to him, no matter how many times he didn't answer.

"I made some lemonade... If you want..." she started one day, maybe not so long ago as the other days. Of course he ignored her. What did she expect? When he didn't answer she retreated into her half of the apartment and he heard her opening the refrigerator, the cupboards. She'd become louder and louder the longer his silence reigned; as if the noise would make him notice her. He noticed her all the time. No matter that he turned his head from her, no matter that he didn't answer her voice.

Something slid out and shattered on the floor - probably a bowl - and she cried out in surprise. He opened his mouth: "are you OK?" was the initial thought; then "I hope you cut yourself." It was difficult not to think these things. Sometimes he saw her walk down the steps ahead of him and thought "fall". Sometimes she stood at the stove and he willed her sleeve to catch fire.

Now she stood too close to him and he thought, "I'm being pulled in two". The ice sang against the glass she held in her faintly trembling hand. And he had to look at her. She looked like she always had. This face was part of the reason he'd loved her, but now he hated it. Those eyes. The eyes, especially, how large they were, how full they could become of any emotion. The ice in the glass shook again and Naruto opened his mouth: "Why are you doing this?"

"I'd made some," she said hesitantly, looking down at the glass. Her lower lip slipped between her teeth and then pulled itself free. That mouth. He hated her mouth, too, because most of what came from it were lies.

"That's not what I'm talking about, and you know it!" If he shouted louder, would he have startled her enough to make her cry? There were something like tears shining in those eyes now.

"You've always liked lemonade," she started.

"Stop," he snapped, and her mouth tightened. "You've always done this when I try to talk to you, talking about something not even relat–."

"Do you remember that time--," she started, and her voice was desperate and breathy. The ice shook against the glass.

"You'll never make it up to me." He'd thought he said the words quietly, but the words on her lips died as if they'd been drowned out.

"I know," she said quietly after a moment. Her hand pressed itself to her neck, her collarbone, but he stared into her face. He could care less about her body; she didn't care for his. And the first tears fell from her eyes, almost synchronized. "It's not that I'm--."

"You, you, you aren't doing it for yourself; is that what you were going to say? Then why are you doing it?" He shouted at her, and more tears, more. "If you aren't so preoccupied with yourself, why not tell everyone what you did? It isn't to protect me, from what I can tell. You don't give a shit about me, you've never given a shit." He paused, and the hush in the air at that moment softened his voice. "I've tried to figure you out. I've never been able to figure you out."

The anger that had for a moment swelled to fill the room suddenly was sucked away, and Naruto looked away from her and out of the window.

"If you're so unhappy, Naruto," she said, and her voice broke . "Why don't _you_ ask to leave?"

"I'm an idiot," he said. Her face was an amorphous blob reflected in the window. "You're all lies, and I'm all stupid."

* * *

Ino sat in the living room, her feet on the table and stared between Sakura, in the kitchen, and Naruto at the table. Usually she was happy to have invitations – she hated to be alone – but this was one that she thought, as she sat popping her fingers and chewing her lip, she would have been happier refusing. It was impossible to refuse when a friend called in tears, though. "He's the only person I have left," she wept. "I have to make this right."

_After what you did, you don't have him_. These were the first words that came to mind, but Ino couldn't say them then; even now, looking at Naruto, straight-backed and hard-mouthed, and seeing how true it was, she couldn't say it.

"Don't you want to leave?" she asked him, when Sakura was out of view. "Maybe it's better if you guys just stop... being together." She asked, "why stay here?" Was it the tilt of his mouth, the tightening of his fingers that told her? He stayed to hurt her, force his presence and the reality of her actions upon her; and he stayed to protect her, because what would either say if they were ever to ask to go their separate ways?

To Sakura she said, "You can't keep going like this."

"I know." Her voice was only a whisper. Then, "am I selfish?" Her eyes narrowed. "He says I'm selfish."

"Right now, yes. Are you staying to make him feel better, or try to make yourself better?" Ino put her arms around her knees. "I think your reasons are getting turned around. Eventually things like this become more for you than they do for anyone else, no matter what you think." She ran a finger up and down the scarred skin beside her eye for a moment, then dropped her hand. "Trust me; it's hard to see from the inside," she said.

* * *

The morning nurse said Sasuke tried to speak. He tried to sit up, to pull the mask from his face; he scratched at the IV's in his arm, clumsily; he collapsed. "Get me out of here," he told her, when she tried to comfort him. His hand was clammy on her wrist, she said; was that normal, or a side effect of the medicines being used?

"A side effect, maybe," Tsunade said. "Don't be so worked up." But Sakura knew his hands had always been cool.

"When will he fully wake up?" she asked.

Tsunade adjusted a drip, took down a note, peered at the reading of his heart rate before speaking. "He's been under so much strain." Her lips spread across her face, a thin, straight line. "He may not be fully lucid for a while."

Sakura stared down at his face, the slightly purple colour of his lids, and tightened her hand into a fist to keep from brushing the hair back from his forehead. It seemed like so long since she'd seen him; and there were days she hadn't thought about him at all, not even once, her head was always spinning with Naruto. She stared at his unmoving hand and longed to touch it.

"He should wake by the day after tomorrow, though," Tsunade finally answered. She touched a hand to his cheek and Sakura bit at her lip. "Naruto will want to see him," she said, and turned to write again on her clipboard.

* * *

She wasn't wearing a dress – that's what surprised him more than the words she'd only just spoken, here, over another tasteless breakfast. Naruto swallowed, wiped his face on a paper napkin. Paper. That's what the eggs had tasted like – paper.

"Sasuke is awake today," she said again. "He's been in and out of consciousness the past couple days." She paused. "He mentioned your name, I heard."

He imagined she'd wear a dress, do her hair for the big occasion. Sasuke's homecoming, delayed while he slept. More time for grand preparation. But Sakura stood in front of him in her work clothes and a rumpled jacket, her hair pulled back from her naked face in a loosening braid. He looked away from her and down to his plate. Still half full. It seemed like he'd eaten so much. He pressed his fork to the table.

"Did you want to see him?" she asked.

_No, _he thought_._ His eyes found the window and the purple haze of morning. What would Sasuke have to say to him, who'd betrayed him for a girl, only to have her betray him in return? _I told you, _he would say. Or worse, there really would be nothing to say. The gap that had always existed between them was too wide to bridge now, and he was alone again. Sasuke wouldn't have to say anything; Naruto already understood. A sigh shook at his lungs. "This is my punishment."

Sakura shifted. "Hn?"

He blinked, swallowed. The world outside the window blurred and he drew his eyes closed. "Nothing," he said. "When can we go?"

* * *

The hospital.

From the tile ceiling to the wooden bedside table, the tiled floors, everything was the same.

Konoha.

He'd been away so long and it hadn't even noticed his passing. Its buildings still squatted beneath wooden and tin-tiled roofs; its people still lingered, unhurried, in the streets. The morning was cool, the clouds violet, the sky clear when the sun rose. Tsunade hadn't changed and watching Konoha, Sasuke wondered if anything had.

Sakura had not. He'd forgotten her voice but when she spoke he thought, _it sounds just like her. _Her hair was even the same. He watched her enter and pause in the doorway, as if surprised by his eyes. "He's awake," she said, and stared at him. Her eyes were still green; green like ponds, like oceans, meant to draw you in because, always, she had to be the center of everything. She had to cover and consume. _You won't be happy without me, said the sea to the desert, but the desert only cared for the sun. It alone won't make you happy, warned the sea._ "But if I'd never known a drop," Sasuke mumbled, "I'd never have been drowned."

She looked away, finally, and in her gaze now, Naruto, staring at the floor, eyes and mouth like slits in paper, pulled thin and long. He sat straight-backed in a chair and Sasuke's eyes slid over his form once, twice, three times. His weak fingers formed a loose fist at his side.

"Why the face?" he asked. The words ripped through his throat, breaking barriers that had grown while he laid asleep. "You won. You've brought me back."

There was no answer. Naruto lowered his head further and at his side Sakura shifted, began to close the door, paused. Her hands hid themselves in her folded arms.

"I'll applaud you," Sasuke said, and brought his uncooperative hands together in a slow clap. "Your last ditch effort was a success." He touched his hand to his leg and the wide smooth scar there, and Naruto mirrored his movement, his eyes stayed riveted to the outside, his brow tightened in a frown. Sasuke lifted his chin. "But I guess you didn't come out so well either. How long are you in the chair for?"

The muscles in Naruto's jaw raised shadows as they tightened.

"Naruto is paralyzed."

If he'd breathed at that moment, her voice would have been lost. Sasuke's head swiveled to catch the whisper and as he stared at her, Sakura said again:

"He's paralyzed."

His heart had grown weaker, maybe, taken too many blows. It faltered now, slowing and then speeding up. Paralyzed, she said, and what warring country would have a paralyzed leader? Sasuke stared at the chair until it became amorphous in his vision. Which was worse of the two: killer of brothers, or killer of dreams? "So I did that to you?" he asked. Naruto's narrowed eyes, his tight mouth, were empty of any emotion Sasuke could discern. His heart faltered again and he whispered, "I guess you haven't won after all then."

What lofty dreams they'd had when they were young: dreams of revenge and of acceptance. And now one dream has been found empty and the other impossible. How strange that both of them should fail. Sasuke fingers tightened against his palm. Why did it surprise him, when they'd both been told as much? _You're chasing nothing. Your ambitions are empty. It's not a dream, but an obsession. _Endless wave upon wave.

"So I did that to you," he said, and his voice was even softer still. Naruto stared at his legs and said nothing.

"I did it," said Sakura.

* * *

It was because fear gripped her before empathy as she watched Naruto beside her, and the growing blush on his face, the tremble in his hands. Fear for herself before she understood his embarrassment. Preoccupation with herself, as he said it, before concern for him. It was because the thought of truth was painful. It was because regret rearranged Sasuke's face into something she didn't recognize.

She spoke and the words brought all eyes in the room to her. His eyes. It'd been so long since she'd seen them and now they seemed foreign, too sharp, too black, too flat. What eyes, then, was she remembering? "I did it," she said again, quickly, before his gaze fully locked her jaw in place.

Naruto moved in the sides of her vision, took in his breath as if he'd been kicked. If she turned her head, maybe she would be able to see gratitude, shock, anger in his face, but all that filled her eyes was Sasuke, Sasuke, Sasuke.

* * *

Sakura only coughed. Naruto expected a scream, maybe, as soon as Sasuke's hands gripped her, but perhaps she was as surprised as he was; perhaps she was also wondering how he'd managed to leap from the bed and across the room as quickly as he did. Perhaps she was confused by the falling medicine poles, the bloodied IV's, the repetitive smack of her head against the tile.

Naruto fought to wheel himself close enough to do something, but his hands fumbled. "Hey!" he shouted. Words seemed to have abandoned him. Sakura's face appeared in the protective triangle of her arms and he stared at it, speechless.

How much time passed before the room was filled with other bodies? A hand gripped his arm, others tugged at Sakura, Sasuke was covered in grasping fists and held to a syringe. Time raced forward to make up what it had lost to shock. Sasuke's hands opened and his jaw went slack. His eyes rolled to white. Sakura dripped blood onto the floor. "Did you," Tsunade asked –and where had she come from, what was that look on her face? Naruto watched the words form on Sakura's beaten mouth: "I did it," she wept, climbing onto her knees. "Yes, I did it."


	7. Chapter 6

Sakura noticed him too late; by the time she tried to step into a room and out of sight, he'd already called out her name, quietly. Her hand tightened on the doorknob – just a moment sooner and she'd have been able to open it and disappear inside – and he watched her twist it experimentally, as if she could still leave. It opened a fraction but she didn't enter, just stared down at the stairs, as if contemplating what laid past them, in the darkness.

Kakashi stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at the side of her head. She tilted her face further out of view as he cleared his throat. "You aren't going to be in charge of Naruto anymore?" he asked. It had taken him a moment to think of what to say. Her hand came off of the doorknob but she didn't turn toward him. He shifted, inhaling. "I heard from Tsunade."

She glanced at his feet, her face, still bruised, lip split, inching into view, and he set his jaw, pressing his teeth together until he heard a high pitched ring in his ear. Why didn't she look him in the face? It was too obvious, now that he saw her. He already knew – he knew the second that they met in the hall – that she was guilty. He cleared his throat, but the words didn't come.

"It's true," she said suddenly. "Everything she told you, it's true." She turned toward him and her cheeks were bright red against her pale face, as if someone had pressed their palms beneath her eyes. She asked, "Can you forgive me?" and in the next moment disappeared down the staircase. Kakashi listened to her hurried descent with closed eyes.

He was glad she hadn't waited for his answer.

He sat in Sasuke's room for as long as he could, but the Uchiha didn't wake. Couldn't wake. Naruto was gone, already packing. _Come with me to pick him up if you want,_ Tsunade had said. He couldn't bring himself to go. He didn't have the energy anymore.

Sometimes he felt like his life was nothing but a series of disappointments and fuck ups.

* * *

The door was ajar and in the center of the empty room was a single suitcase, upright and already packed. Tsunade stood touching her hand to its worn fabric cover. Naruto studied her slumped shoulders before pushing the door further open. "You're late." The shampoo in the bag of toiletries he carried in his lap had already leaked out and formed a pouch in the plastic. He tossed it next to the suitcase. "Thanks for your help packing."

Her hand dropped to her side and she lifted her chin. "Hinata and Kiba wanted to talk to me. They're willing to house you, and so are Lee, Kakashi, and Iruka; I called each of them and they readily--."

"I'm going back to my old apartment," Naruto interrupted. "I don't need to stay with anyone." He shifted backward and moved away from her, into the kitchen.

"Your apartment was on the 13th floor, Naruto."

He opened and shut a few drawers in turn, looking for something but not finding it. "They have an elevator."

"It hasn't worked for 14 years." Naruto's shoulders tightened as the words left Tsunade's mouth. "What kind of nonsense--."

"I'll manage," he interrupted tightly, finally focusing his eyes on her. "Alone. I don't need anyone to do me any favours. I don't need that kind of debt." He slammed the final drawer shut and grasped at his wheels. Tsunade's shoes, those ridiculous heeled sandals, clicked as she followed behind him. Why hadn't she taken them off at the door like a normal person? Her hand grasped his shoulder.

"If you're going to think about it in terms of debt... Naruto, it's not as if you've never done someone a favour---."

"Like what, watering their plants while they're gone?" He shrugged her away. "I'm going to be living in their house, eating their food, and bothering them with these waste-of-time therapy sessions, and what would they get out of the deal? My company?" She shifted in her heels behind him; he covered the noise of her presence by sifting agitatedly though a few books he'd placed on the windowsill for lack of a bookshelf.

"They volunteered to be 'burdened' with you, if that's how you're going to say it." Her voice had grown harder in preparation for an argument. Naruto could imagine the tight wrinkle between her thin brows, the thin set of her lips as she formed her words: "Obviously they aren't thinking about all of this in the same terms as you are."

"They aren't thinking at all." Naruto turned. The wrinkle above her brow was worry; her voice had sounded so much harder than her face. His grey eyes flickered away from her. "Hinata and Kiba live in a one-bedroom house; where do you expect me to fit? Iruka has a family to take care of, he doesn't have time or money to look after me as well. I'm already indebted enough to Kakashi as it is, and his apartment is hardly the size of this living room. There's no way I'd shove into their lives like that and ever feel comfortable."

"What about Lee?" Tsunade said quickly. "Why not stay with Lee, then?"

"Gai visits sometimes," he blurted. His hands paused their pointless searching; the frown on his face collapsed and, briefly, he laughed. "I'd hate to be there when Gai visits."

It took Tsunade a moment to react to him. He suddenly seemed so otherworldly, so strange. It had become hard to remember how he looked when he truly smiled. Seeing him laugh, the wrinkle above her brows slowly disappeared, replaced with a growing tightness in her throat. He used to smile so often, but now she felt she hardly recognized him. The older he grew, it seemed, the smaller his smile had become.

"What if they gave me another full body suit?" Naruto managed, touching his hand to his mouth. "I can't believe I actually wore the first one..."

Tsunade snorted in disbelief. "You wore it?"

"They said it would make me a better fighter." He sighed, the corners of his mouth still upturned. "I was an idiot."

A slight smile tightened Tsunade's lips in the second before hazel eyes slipped from his face to his legs. She took in her breath, open mouthed. "I don't want you to stay by yourself." The corners of his mouth fell, and he was suddenly older again. "It's not healthy," she said, and silenced him with her eyes. "Show me that you care about getting better, and maybe then we can talk about it. But right now..."

"I'm not going to stay with anybody," he said quietly. His shoulders slumped forward and he was suddenly aware of the light streaming through the window, slapping at his neck. He turned his face toward the window and there was only a a dumpster, spray painted over. Where, he wondered, was the stupid light coming from?

"Yamanaka Ino offered you a room, too," Tsunade said suddenly. "She has her own house. It's small, but there's a guest room."

"I already said--," Naruto started, turning his gaze from the window. For a moment the interior of the room seemed impossibly dark in comparison to the outside.

"--And it's funny you should mention debt, Naruto," she continued, arms crossed, "because she said that was the reason she was calling."

He blinked, and her form was suddenly visible again. His eyes moved to his suitcase and the soggy bag beside it.

The Hokage stared at him in the pause, the wrinkle between her brows growing more prominent. "Does she fill your requirements, then?"

Naruto set his chin. "I'm going home." His voice was heavy and quiet. "I'm not staying with anyone."

"You can stay with her." Tsunade unfolded her arms and pulled the few books he carried from his lap. He abruptly grabbed her wrist, but he held her for only a moment, as if realizing the aggressiveness of the gesture.

"We aren't close," he said at length, uncurling his fingers. He pressed his hand to his knee and then quickly moved it to the armrest of his wheelchair.

Tsunade fixed her eyes unwaveringly upon his. "That's why I offered you the chance to stay at everyone else's first," she said evenly. "You'll make the decision or I'm making it for you. You won't live alone."

Naruto narrowed his eyes. "I'm not living with anyone," he said tightly.

"Then you're living with Ino." She turned on her heel and dumped his books into a zippered pocket, pulling the suitcase's handle up. As she bent to pick up the plastic bag she glanced up at him. He sat resolutely by the window, his arms tightly crossed, face turned frowning toward the light. "We're leaving now."

"I'm not going." His arms tightened.

Tsunade straightened, shifting her weight to her left. Her hand came up to rest on her hip. "So would you rather stay here with Sakura?" she asked.

"I'm not staying either." His voice, pressed out from between his teeth, was flat.

She took a breath and felt her nostrils flare as she exhaled. "Naruto," she said. "We're leaving now."

His head turned toward her. With the light like it was, she couldn't see his features. He stared at her, faceless. "I'm going home."

"Go home, if you want, and if you can manage to get to the 13th floor, you can have a nice talk with the people that moved into your old room last week." She saw his head move slightly. His shoulders were high and rigid. "It's been sold," she continued. "You weren't living there and it makes no sense for you to." Tsunade set her jaw. "We're leaving, then. Aren't we?" Her eyes held to his sun-struck form. He lowered his head and put his hands over the wheels of his chair. She released her breath as he drew near. "Thank you," she said quietly.

He turned his face away from her as he passed.

* * *

Ino tugged his suitcase through the door. It was strange that all of his belongings – clothes, photographs, a couple weapons and scrolls, maybe the odd book – fit into something so small. Somehow it was depressing. The wheel stuck again and she yanked the handle from the suitcase's rectangular body; it fell with a loud and heavy thump onto the floor.

Naruto appeared in the entry way -- "What are you doing?" -- and Ino straightened, glancing at the handle, which she still held. "How long have you had this?"

"Since forever." He looked away from her and to the suitcase on the floor. "It'd never broken before."

"Oh. Well." Ino knelt and studied the separated pieces. "Sorry," she said and tried to slip the handle back into the body. It was surprisingly difficult. "Hey, I..." He'd disappeared, so she raised her voice. "I didn't think you'd be coming... I mean... The guest room is kind of... not ready..." She paused for an answer but there wasn't one.

The handle suddenly slipped back, and with a sigh she stood and wandered into the living room, where Naruto was looking silently at the books in her book shelf.

"I fixed it," she said. "Come on, you can see the room at least. I just have to move some boxes. Sweep, too." He turned his head toward her and she raised her brows slightly, stopping mid-step. "Are you coming?"

He shrugged.

"The bathroom is right down the hall from you, between our rooms. Mine's on the opposite side. If you ever need anything, or... See, here's your room..." She pulled the door open, pushed his suitcase inside, and paused at the threshold with her hands on her hips, surveying the room, before she strode over to the window to push open the curtains. "It doesn't look as dreary when you have the window open."

Naruto came into the room and stared for a moment at several boxes which laid atop the bed's wrinkled sheets. Ino followed his gaze.

"I'll take those off, so..." She raised her brows and pushed her hands into her back pockets. "The bureau is empty so feel free to put your stuff in there. The closet doesn't have that much junk... You can just push it aside." She sniffed and wrinkled her nose. "I'll dust, too."

There was a vase atop it that might have been filled with flowers before, transparent save for the dirty-looking white line where water had been left sitting inside it. The room was plain and ordinary and full of pale colours, but she was right; it didn't look too dreary with the curtains opened.

He still hated it.

"Why would you offer to let me stay here?"

She answered after a pause, "It seemed like the right thing. You needed a place." She paused and rested her hand on the box closest to her. "I didn't think you'd chose to stay here," she said conversationally. "Hinata--."

"I didn't choose here," Naruto interrupted.

Ino blinked. "Oh, so that's why you've been acting like this." She pressed a hand to her shoulder, awkward. "It must be because I have a bigger house."

"I chose to live alone." His voice was sharp and he swallowed. His fingers wiped at crease that had grown between his brows. "But apparently that meant forfeiting any choice at all."

"Well, it's only temporary." Ino shifted suddenly, clearing her throat, and pushed her hair behind her ear. It fell quickly into her eyes again. "You probably want to get settled," she said carefully, and quickly took the boxes on the bed into her arms. "I'll have to straighten up later; I've got work." She disappeared through the doorway and he watched her shadow move against the wall until it disappeared as well.

* * *

"The longer you do this, the less chance you have of recovering." Tsunade leaned against her desk. "I know you understand this."

He understood the words. She'd told him the same thing, in some variation, every day. But the word "chances"-- that was one he hated. "What are my chances of recovering now?" Naruto asked. "I don't think they can get any worse." He stared out onto the city. It looked small and dirty. Nothing to be proud of. The day was overcast, like it was every winter. It was his least favourite time of year, but lately he'd lost his distaste for it. What was the difference between this season or any other? He'd be sitting through all of them.

There was a group of birds huddling on the window ledge, looking miserable. They shuddered, wings flapping, as the wind blew by.

"Your bones are getting thinner." Tsunade straightened, pulling her hands from the desk. "Your immune system weaker. It's been 4 months since the injury. Some of the best medics would say that your window for improvement is beginning to close." She took in her breath and sat. "If you want any hope of--."

Naruto felt irritation froth in his chest, expanding to fill his throat. "Shut up," he snapped. Tsunade lowered her chin, eyes unflinching, as if she'd known it was coming. "You said it yourself," he spat. "It's hopeless."

"I never said that," she said slowly. "I said we didn't know how to fix it. That doesn't mean there aren't things you can do to improve your chances--."

"What chances?" he shouted. "Why do all of this work to prepare for a surgery that's impossible?"

Tsunade's fingers braced themselves again on the table. "Impossible. When did you start using that word?" Her eyes stared into his but she seemed to be seeing someone else. "You never used that word before."

Are you seeing me? he wondered. I'm not what I was. Rain began to click against the windows. Nothing was what it had been.

Sakura began changing the moment Sasuke returned. He had fallen asleep with one woman but woken up with another,one who shared tense stares with the man who'd already left her once and stopped looking at the one who had always been at her side. She left and she stayed gone. Maybe he should have fought harder for her, seeing the look that he did in Sasuke's eyes; there was something so obviously hungry, so unsettled, unsatisfied. The emptiness become more and more visible every day, but he ignored it -- Sasuke wouldn't leave again, he told himself, not after everything that had happened, all the second chances, not now that he has Sakura at his side.

But it was difficult not to stare at her, even when he told himself that Sasuke needed her more than he did. Things were so different, almost lonely, now that he'd had her and lost her. He wanted to talk to Hinata but they'd already broken up and grown apart and she was out, gone on a mission with Kiba and some people he didn't really know. People seemed more wrapped up in their lives now that his was coming apart. He worked more, saw the city less. But at some point he came home, turned on the lights, and she was sitting in the semi-darkness in front of his window, one knee pulled up to her chest and her fingers curved against her mouth. Sasuke was gone, and she was back.

Of course.

Should he have known something was wrong when she started showing up again? Should he have felt like he was second best, a sub-par substitute for the man who'd left her twice?

Of course.

But he didn't. Maybe he was stupid, maybe he made exceptions for her because he'd loved her since he saw her and she was beautiful, smart, kind, and somehow, he liked to be there for her when she cried. A year passed and she flitted in and out, didn't answer the phone when he called, showed up when he hadn't invited her, when he was ready to quit everything and forget her. She kicked a hole in his wall so he smashed a vase. She cried about Sasuke over the birthday cake he'd made for her. But she kissed him so passionately, always when he least expected it. She sat next to him at the dinner table and sometimes took his hand.

He believed part of her, at least, loved him, and as pathetic as it sounded now that he he thought of it, that was enough for him when it came to Sakura; she was all he really had. Sasuke was gone again. Jiraiya had been dead for years. Kakashi worked, Iruka got married. People died, or, like Shikamaru, they wasted away for as long as anyone could stand to watch. Everyone and everything was serious. It was time to settle, to grow up, start a family before it was too late; time to find someone to keep close to you. One person, at least. All he wanted was one person; all he wanted was to make her happy. And where had that put him? His dream of becoming Hokage – Jiraiya's hope, the Third's hope, maybe his father's hope – was nothing if not unattainable. The only other girl he'd ever loved was married and pregnant. He'd betrayed the man he would call his brother, his best friend.

It was all for her.

"Naruto." The fingers on his face were cool against his skin, and he suddenly felt feverish. Tsunade's eyes met his, close, when he turned his head. "Stop thinking about her."

"Thinking about who?" He turned his head and pulled his chin from her grasp. The coolness of her fingertips quickly disappeared.

"You're still making yourself ill over her. At some point what's wrong with you isn't going to be her fault anymore." She straightened and her hands curled slowly into fists on her hips. "You have to want to try. It's been two weeks."

"Two weeks."

"Since you moved in with Ino. It was supposed to be a new start but you're thinner, weaker, angrier." Her arms hung from her sides. "You have a fever. Are you eating?"

Naruto raised his eyes to hers. There was a wrinkle of concern on her unblemished forehead. She seemed old, despite her body. Was it her eyes? "She serves dinner every night," he said, and it was the truth.

The wrinkle was suddenly more shallow. She took in a breath and released it. "Start asking for seconds."

* * *

Sakura glanced up from her book and narrowed her eyes as she looked out across the sun-struck yard. A nurse had opened the door to the west wing and spoke loudly as she helped her patient, limping, through. Sakura pulled her jacket further over her cold wrists, sniffing. It looked so much warmer than it felt, and she thought about getting out from beneath the hospital wall's shadow and into the sunlight, but in the end she couldn't be bothered. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, finding her place in the text: _Chakra Circulation and Motor Fiber (Motor Nerve) Compression. _It was an outdated manuscript and she'd found several errors in it so far, but it was the first manuscript she'd come across so detailed and specific. Her notebook was flooded with notes, crammed into straight, dark lines. A forest of words which, for now, she wasn't quite able to navigate. Her hand moved automatically down the page, fingers growing grey with ink.

Naruto saw her sitting like this, her neck bent in concentration, through the wide windows that lined the hallway to the courtyard. Her face, tipped partially out of view, was only a smear from so far away, but she had always been easy to recognize. He'd never been able to get her completely out of his sight, no matter that he might be miles away.

Shizune stopped his chair, the sound of her sandals echoing into silence. Her voice was soft. "Did you want to talk to her?"

Naruto pulled his eyes from the window and fixed them sightlessly on the hallway in front of him. "I don't have anything to say to her."

Shizune knelt beside him and he noticed for the first time the peppering of grey strands in her hair before he looked away again. Her hand, rested on his arm, was cool. "I saw how you were looking at her just now, Naruto. You're making things so difficult on yourself and--."

He slid his arm from beneath her fingers. "Don't talk anymore,"he said abruptly. The hall was flooded with light and he turned his face from Shizune and from the window.

He hadn't always been unable to control his words. At some point in his life, he was charming. A smooth talker, maybe, as impossible as it seemed in light of his youth. He learned to keep his thoughts, emotions, opinions, in check; partly because he grew up, and partly because he knew that control was important for a leader, a quality people could trust. Even now, he was aware of his volatility, knew that the words he was saying were increasingly inflammatory, painful, and misplaced in their hatred. But the words he told himself were harder.

Idiot. The word and so many others circled in his head. Sasuke had warned him, more than once and even though Naruto had seen it himself -- the duplicity in her nature, how easily she could turn on him, or away from him – he wanted her. She seemed so frail, so powerless at times. Why did he want someone to need him so badly? He'd been blinded by her: her instability, her beauty, her volatility, her hair. He'd thrown away his life for the tenuous illusion of love she'd weaved with her wide, green eyes.

They sat close on the benches in the park; he found her asleep on his couch when he came home late from missions; she liked to lean her head on his shoulder; but it wasn't love. In the beginning, when she began meeting him at the gates when he arrived back in town, chatting with Hinata as they both stood in the cold, faces hardly visible beneath scarfs, he thought it was loneliness. When he put his arms around her shoulders were thin and sharp against him. She wanted company and he gave it. When did she suddenly start wanting something else? And when did he start looking forward to catching sight of Sakura's thin figure more than embracing Hinata's?

At first he hesitated to say fate, because saying so would mean they were fated to fail, that he was meant to be as he was.

They tried to get him to exercise, but he wouldn't have it. What was the point? They tried to get him to speak, but he'd rather stare out of windows; he only had bad things to say, anyway. And back at Ino's, he knew, she would heap his plate with food, but he would rather sleep. The curtains kept out all of the light.

It wasn't such a bad room, after all.

* * *

Today he was silent in his room again. On the weekends she closed early, and she expected to catch him as he returned. She'd been sitting at the kitchen table smelling the cookies in the oven – almost done – when she heard him struggle up the ramp and onto the porch. He was at the door before she reached it and she stood in the kitchen doorway as he passed.

"I made some dessert," she'd said, but he didn't acknowledge her voice. The only sound from him was the creaking of the floor and the click of the door as he disappeared down the hall and into his room.

He seemed thinner. But Tsunade wouldn't let him starve.

Ino dumped the cookies into a jar. They'd burned and she wasn't desperate enough for one to force herself to eat it. The smell – blackened sugar - lingered in the hall. She paused outside his door before going to bed but those cookies had burned and she couldn't think of anything to say that might reach him. She'd wanted to be alone for months; who was she to force herself into his company? He would be better when he wanted to be better. His face, each time she saw him – tight browed, broad mouthed, narrow eyed – reminded her of the reflection she'd caught, years before, in the glass over Shikamaru's portrait, and she knew exactly what it meant: I only want to be left alone. She turned her back on his door.

In the restroom she washed her face, her eyes closed until the towel she pressed against her damp cheeks fell away. When they opened they flickered briefly over her reflection. In the artificial light the scars that twisted over her skin looked flat and white. The one beside her eye was worst, hard-looking and knotted, exposed now that her bangs were tied back. She pulled the band that held them away and turned off the light.

The night was cold and the wind kept her up for most of it.

* * *

His thin, pale face; the wrist bones that grew more prominent every time she saw him. If only those things would disappear, the success rate of the surgery – the surgery she hadn't yet planned, created, perfected – could double.

Sakura laid in bed with these thoughts racing, giddy, inside of her head: if she studied just a bit more, if he got stronger, if Tsunade approved her plans, if Naruto would let her operate, if it was a success, if he healed well enough to attempt another surgery... Could he walk again? Could he run? Sakura rifled hurriedly through her notes, spread them on the bed and stared down at them, memorizing, organizing, suddenly fueled with a tentative optimism. The moon was already waning by the time the nervous energy left her and she fell asleep.

She dreamt of cutting him open, the things she would encounter. The glance she had inside would show parts she already knew, parts she'd seen in everyone else. She would precede just like the manuscript told her; shifting tissue, organs, muscle, just enough to fit the pins through. She knew where to place them, each one; was prepared for the shock of chakra she would receive. She wouldn't jerk, wouldn't stab at the wrong point. She imagined the silvery yellow glow that would tell her she'd done everything perfectly. She imagined that she finished, smiled, and said:

"We fixed him."

The nurses exhaled, their shoulders falling, no longer tense. Sakura, too, might have breathed a sigh of relief, but a chill of foreboding raced up her back and up into her head, sweat beading in its wake, and she knew, suddenly, with painful certainty, that she couldn't remove her hand. Something wasn't right. She stood petrified and the nurses, staring, began to murmur, their eyes roving between her and each other and Naruto, lying with tissue over his face. Her own eyes stayed riveted to her hand. Her chest shook with the effort of withholding her breath. She imagined blood, pouring up over his stomach, running down his side. So much blood, if she only breathed. She stood rigid, one hand braced on the operating table, her eyes wide and unblinking, her chest swelled, and her heart rattling within it. She couldn't breathe, couldn't move, no matter what, if she wanted him to stay alive.

When she woke up she was standing at the kitchen table, gripping a chair's back rest in one hand, her other, with cramped fingers, outstretched toward the dishes she'd left there. Her body was cold with sweat, and her hair laid plastered to her forehead, as if she had a fever. Going back to sleep was a difficult process, and she only half succeeded, lying in a daze and thinking thoughts she couldn't remember, wondering if she fallen asleep and then realizing she hadn't.

Tsunade had met her in the hallway. He saw you today, she said. Don't come in anymore. Take a break. Leave him alone. It's what's best. She caught a glimpse of him but he didn't look toward her. He was someone else, a stranger. There was nothing she could do, she realized, that would take everything back. Of course, things only kept moving forward, and there was no way she could reverse - take back, redo – anything. If only she could talk with him. Try harder, she would say. I'm trying so hard. I'm treading water. I'm drowning.

The heater growled noisily. The ceiling fan turned and Sakura stared up at it, hot, sweating, even as the wind howled outside and the cold beat at the windows. With each revolution of the fan she wondered, _what can I do?_

_What can I do?_

_What can I do?_

"Naruto..." she started. But even when he wasn't there, glaring at her, she couldn't think of how to finish the sentence. It used to be so easy to speak to him; maybe that's what attracted her to him in the first place. At some point he'd transformed from this loud, brash idiot into someone she could almost call charming. She often saw him in street-side restaurants with Hinata and that strange little half smile on his face, his head tilted as he listened. He cut an impressive figure, the more time passed.

The first stab of jealousy had surprised her: an ache that rose from the very pit of her stomach to grasp at her heart as she sat at the table, staring at the backward window decals with a coffee raised to her lips, and Ino and Chouji across from her, splitting pastries and chatting. The weekend crowd seemed faceless, a conglomerate of people with no distinct identity, all wheeling around together through the streets, but he was suddenly visible.

What made that unfamiliar iciness rise from her stomach to her chest? The smile on his face, or the hand that he so carefully kept pressed to Hinata's back? She dreamt about that half smile and woke feeling strange and unsettled, restless. She saw Hinata on her way to work and even as she ignored the slight wave of acknowledgment the gentle girl gave her she knew that it was stupid, ridiculous to feel possessive of something she didn't have.

It wasn't a conscious decision to see more of Naruto. Sakura could say that, at least. But in the end she knew what she'd done, and what she was doing. Naruto appeared on her doorstep more and more often. He smiled at her and she thought she was happy; never mind that they still snuck around, even after the rift between Naruto and Hinata grew too wide for either to pretend to ignore any longer.

Maybe they might have have married. Sasuke had receded far into her mind, and Naruto was the one who brought her flowers randomly, who wrapped his arms around her. Maybe she would have married him, if Sasuke never came back. But he did. He'd left her once before, but so gently. Thank you, he'd said. Despite all the years that passed she still dreamed of that moment, woke up with an aching throb in her heart and all of the breath squeezed out of her lungs. When he came back and their eyes met – only for a second, just before he was lead away – she felt the same dull pain, a pull, as he passed. He'd stared at her for as long as he could. Even when he left the second time, she couldn't stop thinking about him. Naruto would never change that.

In the morning Sakura stared bleary eyed at the bulging folder on her desk. There were so many ways she had hurt him. There was no running away from that anymore.

* * *

The nurse froze as soon as he touched her and Naruto felt the pulse in her wrist abruptly quicken before he released her arm, pushing it away from him. "Just give me a break, alright?" he said quietly. "That's enough for today."

The nurse stepped back and glanced at the doorway. She was small and even the resolute look she suddenly plastered on her face looked frail. He was getting younger and younger nurses, and he wondered if word was spreading that he was difficult. It was always the lower ranking ones that drew the short straw.

"There are three more exercises scheduled today." She took a step toward him and laid a faintly trembling hand on his arm, smiling slightly. She reminded him for a moment of Hinata, with her dark hair. But the smile she'd painted over her fear –was that the look in her eye, or was it annoyance?-- screamed _Sakura_. "This one is very simple. I'll just help you up and--"

He grasped her wrist again and watched the emotions flicker over her features. Annoyance, fear, anger, and then fear again.

"I said, that's enough." He leveled his eyes with hers as he released her for the second time. "This is pointless." Outside the icy rain was coming down in sheets, tapping noisily against the window.

The nurse clasped her hands in front of her skirt and cleared her throat. "Please, we have scheduled three more exercises..."

Naruto raised his eyes to her. "If you touch me again--."

"Koyama?" The voice was so easy to recognize. It filled the room and sucked the air straight from his lungs. "Could you go to room 17A and help with the patient there? I'll take over in here."

The nurse escaped with a soft exclamation of relief and Naruto found himself alone with Sakura. She stared down at the folders she held, hands beginning to shake as soon as the door closed. She spent a moment trying to straighten her shoulders, trying to look more confident. Her frailty suddenly seemed like an act. The way she spoke, so softly, as she held the folders out to him in both hands; he found everything transparent.

"These are my notes about you," she said, when she'd managed to bring her trembling body within arms' reach from him. "I filled the blue one this morning. I was reading all night." She swallowed again. "It's a lot," she said. "If you give me more time... I just want you to know, I'll keep going like this until I find out how to fix what I did. I'll find a way, if you promise to work harder too."

Did she stay up all night rehearsing, too? Naruto glanced between her face and the folders. The soft voice, her downcast gaze, the paper in her arms. He held out his hand and watched her eyes widen as she saw the gesture. "Give me them," he said. His voice seemed so mechanical that for a moment he was tempted to speak again, to try to sound more like himself, more like the person he was. Or had been. She stood, lips parted, as if she didn't hear him. "Give me them," he said again, loudly.

She said something as she laid the folders in his hand, but he didn't care to listen anymore. For a second he looked at the notes, saw their many wrinkles, smudged lead and ink, scratched out page numbers, the upper quarter of a diagram. But he held it all only for that second, as Sakura looked on, wet-eyed, her empty hands fisted. He lifted his eyes to hers. "Fuck you."

The folders opened on the floor with a satisfying crack, spilling papers, throwing them into the air. He watched her through the falling slips of paper, eyes dark and hard.

"Do you think doing this will make things like they were?" His voice easily filled the room. "Did you think coming in here and acting like you're about to cry is going to make me forgive you?"

Now she closed her eyes briefly, as if collecting herself. Cry, he wanted her to cry, he wanted more to see through. "Please, Naruto." Her voice broke and he nearly laughed. "I have to--."

"I can't stand to see you. If I never saw you again, if I never heard your name again, if I could erase everything _you _from my head, it still wouldn't be enough!" The door had clicked open but he didn't lower his voice. As Tsunade entered it grew louder, as if he wanted all of the hospital to know. It didn't matter; most of Konoha knew by now, had heard rumours. She paused grimly in the doorway and Naruto, noticing her, tore through the pile of paper on the floor. "I'm done," he said, passing.

She didn't try to stop him.

Sakura crouched and began gathering the loose leafs into a pile. Her shoulders tightened as Tsunade's footfalls grew closer, pausing as she bent to pick up a diagram. She studied it for a moment, first with interest, then with disappointment. "Did you really think he'd be receptive to you?" she asked softly, glancing over the penciled notes.

Sakura slowly opened a folder and pressed a handful of wrinkled papers into it.

"I'm already having a hard time of getting him to do anything." Tsunade held out the diagram in her hand. One month, but neither of them, it seemed, was any closer to divining a strategy for combating Naruto's injury. Soon it would be too late. Maybe it was already. "Don't give him another reason not to come here. Sakura, I already told you to keep away from him."

Sakura turned her head to regard the page at her shoulder. For a moment she paused, as if expecting some further comment. None come and she ducked her head, swallowing. "I understand," she mumbled, and took the page in her hand.

* * *

The rain had long since ceased to be cold. For a while it was like fire, stinging at his hands, his face, but now everything was as numb as his legs. He heard his teeth chatter but his mouth didn't seem to be moving. His fingers creaked as they grasped and released the wheels of his chair. The ice against his face was no longer sharp and cutting. He hardly registered their dull impact.

The house was dark and quiet and cold. He sat in the room where he slept for a moment, listening to the crisp, random patter of water on the wooden floor. The wind blew against the window and he shivered, shivered, couldn't seem to stop.

The bath tub with the rubber mat. He hated it. His jacket stuck around his shoulders but he was too tired to cuss at it, too tired to wrestle with it. He tugged at it halfheartedly until it finally slipped free, and fell to the tiled floor with a sharp slap. The brace on his back, waterlogged, was beginning to chafe now that he was moving; he pressed his hand to it as he bent, grabbing at his pant leg, and lifted his foot onto his knee to unstrap his shoe.

His fingers recoiled slightly as they touched his skin. His lips tightened. It was never different, no matter how he prepared; it was impossible to recognize himself, like touching a stranger, and he wondered, _is this what everyone who touches me feels?_ As if he was something not quite human, not quite right? He reflexively wiped his hand against his pants and repressed a disgusted shiver. Maybe those times that he'd grabbed her hand and she'd pulled away was because of this, the way his skin felt now under his fingers: alien and uncomfortable.

He hated it. He hated her.

The water that poured from the faucet began to steam. It filled the room and displaced all of the breathable oxygen. Everything was small and stifling. When he thrust his frozen fingers into the hissing stream they flared with pain, agonized with the sudden change in temperature. His skin grew redder. The fingers of his right hand were no different; his palms, his wrists, his face, neck, chest. They flinched at contact, protested loudly, stung in the heat and humidity. Next his feet. To the ankles. The knees. He held his thigh beneath the tap.

The skin began to blister, but he felt nothing.

* * *

The bathroom rug was damp as Ino brushed her teeth. She shivered and threw an arm tightly around her stomach. The front teeth, the left side. She spit. Tops and bottoms. Her eyes roved over the mirror, studying the reflection of the bath curtain, the high, dark slit of a window, the wet clothes balled beside the toilet. He couldn't put them in the hamper? She paused and her gaze flickered to the hallway. She spit. Back teeth and right side. As she brushed she crept to the bathroom doorway and stared toward his. No light visible beneath his door.

He didn't seem to be getting better. His silence was somehow a relief and a burden at the same time. She was glad he avoided her; she didn't like awkward interaction. But the longer he he stayed so isolated, the more uncomfortable she became. She'd realized as she stood misting flowers at work that she was worried about him, despite the casual distance that had always existed between them.

The toothpaste began to sting at her tongue. She turned from his doorway and spit.

* * *

In the early morning Sakura had come to work and disappeared silently down the stairs, to the medical library in the basement. It was dark and whether dawn had finally broken or not, she didn't know. Her hand formed letters automatically, cramped. Her eyes penetrated the blurry text of her manuscript. There was a neglected stack of current medical reports she was supposed to be filling out, but she couldn't keep her mind on birthdate, blood type, and maiden name long enough to finish even one.

A shadow appeared on the stairs, bent, and Sakura turned toward it, her hand twitching away from the folder. She shoved it beneath a pile of books and pulled the reports closer wit a hand, standing as Tsunade came into view, squinting into the dimness. She paused halfway down the stairs and sighed. "So you are here, after all."

Sakura swallowed. "Yes, Tsunade."

It was hard to see her face. She straightened and looked away, pursing her lips. "Since you're down there and you have the clearance, I need you to look up a secondary number for Hatake Kakashi. The one on public file isn't working." She turned back toward the door and with each step she ascended Sakura felt anxiety twist her stomach.

"It's early to be calling him, isn't it?" she blurted. And why call Kakashi, unless it had something to do with Naruto, or with Sasuke? Sakura laced her fingers together, tightly, and cleared her throat. Tsunade had stopped, head slightly cocked.

It was quiet enough to hear the distant sounds of the hospital above through the open door until Tsunade's feet began to move again on the stairs, her footfalls loud and clipped, like her tone. "Route the number to the front desk and have the nurse there tell him that the matter concerns Naruto," she called behind herself. "I'd like him to be here as soon as possible." Her shadow continued up the stair way until the the door closed.

The dimness was suddenly disconcerting.

* * *

"You don't have to say anything. Tsunade already bitched at me." Naruto had said it at the beginning of the conversation, as soon as Kakashi entered, and for a long while his teacher hadn't spoken at all, just stared at the angry red burns on his shins, sticky with salve and still uncovered. Maybe he would have stayed quiet with that unfamiliar sadness in his eye if Naruto hadn't, on impulse, brought his open hand down on the inflamed skin of his leg. It was that heaviness that he saw in Kakashi's brow that made him do it, the obvious concern in the fingers he laced tightly beneath his chin.

"Don't worry," he'd said and pushed himself up, first onto an elbow and then far enough that his hand reached, with a lunge, just below his knee. It struck his skin with a slap that left his palm stinging and he fisted his fingers against it. The imprint slowly faded from bright white to red and even as he opened his mouth he knew what he had done was stupid. "See?" He spoke but couldn't turn to Kakashi. "I don't feel anything."

Kakashi's hands slipped apart and one came up to rub at his face. He leaned on his knees. "You aren't even trying, are you?"

The words brought ice up into Naruto's stomach; his chest washed cold. He had the strange inclination to laugh, but the bubbling against his ribs only produced an almost soundless wheeze when it passed his lips. Kakashi was staring at him, waiting for an answer, he knew, but he couldn't bring himself to face him. His fisted hand was going numb. "Try?" he asked, when he could speak. "There's nothing to try."

"Bullshit," Kakashi interrupted. His visible eye narrowed as Naruto turned toward him, mouth opening. "Jiraiya wouldn't recognize you if he saw you today. Maybe you don't realize how much pain you're causing the people around you."

Naruto's jaw clenched. "The pain I'm causing?" His voice was flat, the sentence a statement.

"When I think about what you must be going through, I--." Kakashi broke off, his hand moving agitatedly against his face, the back of his head. "And you say don't feel anything? What are you doing to yourself?"

The nervous gestures, the unfamiliar tilt of his brow; none of it became him. Naruto looked up at the ceiling, laying back, but the image of his teacher's face was too easy to remember. His eyes roamed the tiles. "I don't feel anything," he said firmly. He uncurled his hand, turning it palm down on the sheets, and concentrated on the blood that rushed to fill out the depressed half moons dotting the flesh beneath his fingers.

Kakashi's voice softened the slightest bit. "I've seen you fight odds worse than this," he sighed. "Do you know what I think it is?"

His fingers felt cramped but he couldn't move them. Kakashi's question had him paralyzed. He had the idea that maybe, if he laid still enough, he could disappear completely and leave Kakashi speaking only to himself. His throbbing hand. It was the one sensation kept him grounded, tied to the bed and the room and the shithole that his life had become.

"I said, do you know what I think it is?" The voice at his bedside had grown insistent again. Naruto swallowed.

"I don't think you know shit." He brought his elbows up and put his hands behind his head, shielding his face from the older man. "That's what I think."

Kakashi's head tilted. "You could deal with this, I know you could." Hearing him, Naruto pressed his elbows tighter against his ears. There was a growing impatience in his arms and he suddenly wanted to get up and leave, but it was impossible to do anything on impulse, not the way he was now. There was no spontaneity anymore. Kakashi, beside him, took in his breath. "You still love her, even after this. That's what it is, isn't it?"

Naruto turned his eye through the crook in his elbow and found himself instantly caught in Kakashi's unblinking gaze. A sharp, short laugh exploded from his mouth when his eyes suddenly met his teacher's. Even to his own ears it sounded forced, unnaturally clipped and loud. "You really don't know shit." Beside him, Kakashi sighed heavily, his shoulders dropping.

"So you want to lie to me?" he asked quietly. "Do you really want to live like you are?"

"Would anyone choose to live like this?" Anger built in his throat, a hot pressure that he knew would tongue tie him and force rash words from his mouth. "Live? How else am I supposed to live, when I can't do anything for myself and no one can do anything for me, either?"

Kakashi looked pointedly at the awkward lay of his legs, at the back brace strapped around his stomach, and Naruto felt his stomach flutter with resentment.

"What do you want?" he shouted. Somehow his voice had become loud; it filled his ears, louder than the sound of his own heartbeat. "What can I do? It won't make a difference!" He fell back against the wall and threw his forearm over his face. "Get out of here. You don't know what you're talking about."

"You're the only one who can do anything about this."

"And I can't do anything." He closed his eyes tightly, and pressed his arm against them. Maybe the tighter he pressed the less he would hear. "Get out."

Kakashi shifted beside the bed. "Have you really tried?"

"Fuck off, Kakashi!" Naruto's arm dropped from his face and he grasped the sheets crumpled at his side as his words exploded into the still air. "'Have I tried?' What is there to try? 'Do I love her?' No, I hate her, more than you could ever fathom, more than I hate you and Tsunade and everyone the fuck else who tells me to try for something useless. Do you have your answers now? Get out!"

It took a moment for him to clearly see his teacher's face – his head was pounding, his jaw clenched. Kakashi stood quietly at his bedside, like a column, but his face -- maybe it flinched, but what Naruto most recognized was the weariness there, so evident despite the mask, the hidden eye.

The door opened and Kakashi promptly turned as if to leave. Tsunade, in the doorway, raised her brows, his name falling from her mouth, but Naruto had already brought his palms against his ears, slipping his fingers behind his head and obscuring his face with his elbows, didn't hear anything but the faraway, incomprehensible grumble of Kakashi's voice. His mouth opened on impulse. "You don't have to come back." He swallowed, staring hard at his knees until he heard Tsunade close the door.

"Naruto..."

He grasped a sheet and threw it over his legs before pressing his hands behind his head once again. They shook and he pressed his fingers tightly to his scalp. There were too many words he wanted to say, and no way he could say them.

"Naruto."

He would not look at her.

Tsunade sighed and her voice, when she finally began to speak, seemed far away, as if it didn't have the energy to traverse the small distance between them. "I wonder," she said quietly, "how many friends you'll lose like this."

Naruto turned his head further from her, arms tense. The sheet that he cast over his legs was nothing.

* * *

Ino stared at her shoes and for a moment she wished she'd never met him, that he'd never shown up and that she'd died out there next to Chouji, close to Shikamaru. It was because of him, tenfold, that she was standing beneath Tsunade's angry eyes, apologizing and blushing so red she was dizzy with the blood in her face. Her neck had a crick in it from bowing so long. She stared at her shoes and apologized again: "I'm sorry, Tsunade." She was acutely aware of the cluster of nurses around her, in the periphery, hanging out of sight and onto every single word being spoken. She remembered working here at the hospital, the gossip over lunch, the tittering.

"Didn't you notice?" The Hokage's gaze struck at her exposed neck as she bowed her head; she intuited the frustration in it and it was more than easy enough to incorporate that frustration into her own.

"I didn't know anything about it," she said quickly. She swallowed and cleared her throat. "I assumed he was eating here when he said he wasn't hungry."

"So I suppose you didn't notice he was wasting away. Didn't see he had a fever." Ino burned, listening to the words. As a nurse, missing these things was inexcusable: that was the message behind Tsunade's words.

"I assumed he needed space. I didn't see him for days at a time. I attributed his thinness to worry and depression." She swallowed. It was growing harder to swallow and she was tired of staring at her shoes. She closed her eyes tightly.

"He was depressed and you allowed him to sit in his room all day long? I'd think that you, of all people, would know better." Tsunade paused. "Did you want to be left alone after?"

Ino bit at her lip. "No," she answered. But the real answer was yes. Shikamaru died and yes, she wanted to be alone, felt safe when she laid on her side in the dark, loved being able to lose herself in day dreams of the past without the worry that someone would come and try to snap her out of it. Her throat was dry. "Is it bad?" She lifted her head. "His injuries?"

Tsunade sighed. The fire had suddenly collapsed, and it only smoldered now. "They aren't third degree. But every blister popped while he slept and I'm fairly certain he'll get at least one infection." She paused and looked around. The nurses who'd been listening so attentively had already scattered and closing her eyes she fell back against the counter, pressing her fingers to her forehead. "He doesn't give a damn about himself anymore."

Ino straightened slowly. "I'm sorry, Tsunade. I was trying to give him space. I didn't think we were close enough friends for me to impose on him."

Tsunade's amber eyes flickered up. "Always make him eat. Keep a diary on him for me. What he eats, his mood, whether he exercises. His routines. And you're responsible for bringing him here and taking him home. I want him to be unsupervised for as little time as possible."

She was suddenly desperately thirsty. "Yes." She hardly managed to keep from sounding as strangled as her throat did.

Tsunade sighed, straightening, and her hand dropped to her side. "Pick up the antibiotics I ordered for him. Make sure he takes them." She paused. "Talk to him." Her eyes pierced at Ino's. "I expected you to step up to the occasion. You said you had a debt to pay, after all."

The guilty blush that rose in Ino's face was unbearably hot.

And so she caught him in his room and told him dinner was ready. "I've set you a place," she said, and smiled.

"I'm not hungry," was his answer.

"Tsunade's hounding me." She looked away, the smile fading. Maybe, if she seemed as reluctant as he did, he would feel less pressure from her. "I'd rather not get in trouble again."

And he was quiet for a long moment.

"Just eat something. That's all," she insisted.

And he closed his book.

The corners of Ino's mouth might have slipped up as when began to move from the corner, but the soft frown that marred his face became quickly apparent. He glared as he left the room.

Ino pulled her shoulders back. She hadn't expected him to act as he had at Sakura's, especially not with her. She glanced over at him, sitting hunched over the table, as she filled his plate at the counter and wondered if she wouldn't prefer him being invisible again, locked in his room. She hardly knew him as a friend; she expected some level of politeness, some level of decorum which wasn't present now in his conspicuous frown, the hard corners of his eyes.

"It's convenience store food tonight," she said carefully. Already things were growing more and more awkward. Somehow she'd become less of a people person. Of course, he wasn't helping. "Not homemade. It tastes OK anyway..." She covered a wavering watermark on the table with his plate.

"It's just food," Naruto mumbled. "It all tastes the same."

"Chouji would be upset if he knew you said something like that." She caught his face as sat and saw his growing distaste, evident in the curve of his mouth. His words came to her in a flash. "When you stop being depressed, food will taste a lot better, you know." She paused and waited for his reaction.

Naruto raised his eyes from his plate. "Ino," he said "It isn't any of your business."

She paused, her rice raised halfway to her mouth. "I know," she started.

"Obviously you don't know," he interrupted quietly. "Because you're still talking."

She tightened her mouth for a moment before forcing a slight smile. "They're your own words." She was almost surprised by the growing tension there, in his mouth and his forehead, when his voice was so flat and lax. She dropped her gaze back to the food in front of her and raised her brows. "Remember?" She popped a piece of chicken into her mouth, chewing, shrugging. She tilted her head, casual, and said lightly, "it's good advice, anyway."

"My own advice." He speared a thin slice of meat but then dropped his silverware onto the table, his lip tightening further. He looked out of the window and toward the city. "I remember," he said suddenly. "When you were trying to kill yourself, right?"

Ino blinked, swallowing, and quickly forced a self-conscious laugh. "It wasn't quite like that, Naruto." Her throat suddenly closed and her words ended in a whisper. She quickly cleared her throat and nonchalantly pushed another block of rice past her lips. It was mealy in her mouth.

Ino's smile had quickly faded. He heard the uneasiness in her voice, and when she turned her head like that, looking away, so lost in thought, she looked so much like Sakura. The annoyance that had risen in his chest at the sounds of her conversational banter was suddenly anger. He felt it in his throat, the sudden harshness of his voice, the tighter knit of his brow.

"Didn't you collapse at Sakura's birthday dinner?" He'd carried her to the hospital, just down the block. Sakura hadn't missed him. She was too busy drinking and asking where Sasuke was, how he could have left her. Naruto blinked and the city lights came back into focus, looking dimmer than before. Why was he always thinking of Sakura? "Pathetic," he mumbled.

Ino's eyes had flickered back to him as soon as the words left his mouth. He was angry, she understood. For a moment she considered letting his comments, obviously intended to hurt her, slide, but in that moment his face showed a disgust so intense her neck prickled. She swallowed, leaned forward, and in her quietest voice, began to speak. "What the hell is your problem?" she asked. "Because it shouldn't be with me." His gaze suddenly shifted from the window to hers before she could look away and locked her there. Her fingers reflexively tightened on her chopsticks as his mouth opened, his eyes dark and hard.

"I guess you were too stupid to realize it's good that he died," he said. His tone was low but the voice was harsh and grating.

Her hand, half way between her plate and her mouth, slowly lowered itself onto the table. Tears welled against the back of her eyes, so quickly they ached. She wished they hadn't; she wanted to be pissed, to punch him in the mouth, but her body seemed incapable of obeying her. "What?" she managed.

He thrust his hand against the plate in front of him, forced it to the center of the table where it caught and flipped over, sending Ino's glass tumbling, spilling tepid tea over her knees. "He was lucky," he said. In the silence that had followed the sound of glass and porcelain, his voice, quiet again, was harsh and heavy in the air.

Ino had hardly managed to pull her eyes away from the tea on her legs before he'd turned silently toward the doorway, hands fisted over the wheels of his chair. Even now, she could see the strength in his arms, his hands, the breadth of his shoulders. Her teeth clenched as he disappeared into the hallway. He was alive. _He_ was alive, and Shikamaru was somehow the lucky one?

"Naruto!" she shouted, fisting her hands. She beat the table again and his glass jumped onto its edge, spilling and clattering against the wood. She stood and her chair tumbled to the ground. It was anger that propelled her though the narrow hall, wedged her through the space between him and the wall, and it was in anger that she grabbed at the armrest of his chair, with anger that she stopped him. It was in anger that she suddenly realized she hated him.

Naruto pushed roughly at her hand. "Get off of me," he said.

His hand on hers – it sent a chill up her arm and she pressed it to her thigh, rubbed away his touch on the wet fabric of her pants. "Apologize!" She swallowed the ache that was starting to form again in her throat. "Apologize right now!"

Air slipped through his teeth and he looked pointedly away from her, bracing his hands on the wheels of his chair, as if he planned to move through her. "Get out of my w--."

Her tea-wet fist was only on his cheek for a fraction of a second, but the sound seemed to linger longer. "Do you think I'm going to let you walk all over me?" she hissed.

Naruto's eyes flickered up to her, blank and dark. There was something there, in his gaze, that made her abruptly remember why he was there, and what her role was in all of this. She slowly uncurled her numb fingers and hid the offending hand behind her , she broke her eyes from his and pressed her back to the wall.

"I shouldn't have done that," she admitted, quietly. "But you didn't have to bring him into it." There was a pain pulling across her sternum. It hurt to reign all of the fury in.

Naruto said nothing, and Ino set her jaw as he opened the door to his room, silent.

"Are you really not going to apologize?" Her voice grew louder as the door clicked shut. "You didn't have to bring him into it!" The lock slipped into place and in frustration she kicked at the door frame. "Naruto!" she shouted against the door. It smelled like paint as she rested against it, listening for an answer. None came.


	8. Chapter 7

She'd tried to be a better person. She really had.

Asuma died, and as she stood in front of his grave with everyone she found herself staring at the two teammates she had left. She realized that they were the only ones, out of all that she could call friends, who truly knew her. The only other person she could call close was lying in the ground, dead. It took effort to stay standing beside her parents when she could see Chouji and Shikamaru there, out of the corner of her eye, when she wanted so much to be closer to them, to grab their hands in her own. Maybe she'd never felt passionate until that moment, when she realized all she wanted was to stay with them.

When they both left for missions that she was not strong or talented enough to attend, she found herself awake every night, staring at the ceiling until the early morning hours when her mind finally shut down, exhausted, and allowed her to sleep. She trained everyday to become eligible to join them, and she grew more capable than she'd ever thought she could become. She almost cried, only out of happiness, when she was assigned a mission with them, knowing that they would be able to stay together again, like they had when they were young.

Chouji died, and as she stood in her flower shop before his funeral, she sobbed harder than she had in years. The flowers suddenly looked so beautiful, all the colours brighter, every petal more perfect, more fragrant, than she'd ever known them to be. Was this how Chouji, always smiling, always optimistic, saw the world? She wanted to be like him, have that part of him, see the world like this – bright, beautiful, full of hope – like he had. And so she hung onto Shikamaru for 13 months, knowing he would wake up, preparing for the day when he would. When he didn't, she at least had her memories, and the patience and forgiveness which that long, slow year had taught her.

And when those weren't enough, she still had his cigarettes.

Naruto only left the room because Tsunade made him. If not for that, he might have spent the every day in there, wasting away, staring at nothing, in the dark. And Ino, truthfully, wouldn't have cared less. She would have let him starve in his room if she had the guts to. If she had that callousness.

But she ended up cooking breakfast day after day. He hardly ate anything. She sat in the living room and drank coffee every morning, resisting the urge to go into that box in her closet. Don't waste a cigarette on him, she'd tell herself. But just looking at him made her angry at everything. Some mornings she thought that if she looked at him too long, she might break something across his face.

Tsunade had called this morning too, like she had every morning since his 'accident'. Why, Ino didn't know. He never did anything. He never tried.

He never apologized.

In the last month Sakura had been to visit her several times. The first time had been to ask for a body. Her father still worked in Interrogation, and Sakura knew it. "Could he lend me something?" she asked, and Ino stared at her for a moment.

"Nothing alive," she answered at length. Sakura had nodded.

"That's fine." The skin beneath her eyes was lavender, the colour of the eye shadow Ino had worn when she was younger. "Tsunade wants further proof. The manuals I'm working off of are too full of outdated practices and contradictions, she said." Her eyes flickered up. Maybe it was the clouds outside but it seemed like the green had been replaced with something more grey and watered down. "It can work."

Ino turned her face away to hide the wrinkle in her brow. The subject of everything was Naruto, now a days. Work was her only escape.

Every day he went to therapy and every day he wasted everyone's time, doing nothing but the bare minimum. At home he sulked, didn't eat her food. The smallest thing she said was suddenly twisted into something else and thrown back at her. She's smoked two cartons in the last month and that was more than she'd ever used.

It was easy to push him to the back of her mind, along with his snide remarks, drawn face, and angry voice, when she was working, and she spent as much time as possible in the flower shop. She stopped shutting down the store on time, just waited until Tsunade called, wondering when she was going to pick him up. "Sorry," she'd say, coming in at 7, "winter is a busy season." But it was a lie. Tsunade knew it. Naruto must have known as well, but he was such an ass already it was difficult to tell if he was any angrier than usual. At closing time she flipped the sign and sat behind the counter and knew he was at the hospital, refusing to do anything and waiting to go home so he could badmouth her.

Shikamaru's portrait stared down, looking bored, throughout it all. Once he'd told her, "you've got to be more like a duck." It was one of the stupidest things she'd ever heard and how it came from someone as smart as him, she didn't know. "It's nothing," he told her. "It's water on a duck's back. You've got to be more like a duck." He looked up at the sky and sigh. "Ducks never have to do anything troublesome."

Ino sat at the counter, watching the day darken, and she knew that her time alone was coming to a close. She felt it as acutely as the cold draft that swam around her slippered feet. "I'm not a duck," she mumbled, dropping her eyes from the portrait. She glared at the troublesome phone as it began to ring.

* * *

Exercise, recovery, none of it interested him. He worked half-heartedly. Or heartlessly, maybe, could be the word. Naruto stared out of the window. Heartlessly somehow seemed to fit. He didn't care and he didn't care that people knew he didn't care. Wasn't it enough that he'd tried for all of his viable life? Why did they feel the need to poke and prod at him now, now that he was giving up, just like everyone had wanted him to do before? They wanted him to know his limits.

Well, he knew them now.

Shizune's quiet voice in the hall – it grated at his nerves. He made out his name, and words like 'concern', 'apathy'. The sky was close, grey, and full of clouds. Still not low enough for him to reach it. He stared at the muted sun until Shizune touched his shoulder and he flinched away. The look he cast her, dark, unreadable, was second nature now.

"We can stop now," she said quietly. Her resignation drew down her face and for a moment Naruto felt he'd seen into the future, seen the face she'd have in death.

It would scare him, if he could force the will to care.

* * *

Ino could cook for him, but she could not make him eat. Another meal, wasted on him. It laid scattered and cold on his plate, half-eaten. She tried to ignore the scraping sound of his fork against the ceramic and closed her eyes as her hand settled on a glass in the cabinet. "Do you want any tea or something?" she managed. Her teeth ached.

"Could you not talk?"

Ino turned her head incrementally and fixed him in her peripheral vision. He sat rigid, his drawn face tight as his fist. "What?"

"Instead of tea, maybe you could just stop talking." Naruto set his fork noisily beside his plate and Ino turned back toward the cabinet, pulling a coffee mug free.

"Fine. It takes too much energy to try to be nice anyway,"she muttered. The glass she pulled from the cabinet stirred the silverware drying in the dish drainer into loud clanging as she set it loudly onto the counter. "If you don't want to eat perfectly good food, how could I assume you'd want to drink anything I offered you, either." Her voice dropped.

He lifted his fork and then dropped it again; she registered the sound with a barely controlled shudder of irritation. "Does it matter that I don't eat? What's it to you?" he asked. She didn't have to turn to see the anger in his eyes. She felt his gaze fixed securely on her back.

"Truthfully? No. I don't care whether you like it or not. Starve yourself to death if you want to." The pot she'd heated her tea in clattered noisily into the sink as she finished speaking, as if to punctuate her words.

Naruto watched the agitated motions of her arms, her high, stiff shoulders. "Starve myself to death." He paused and pulled his hands from the table, crossing his arms. "I guess it wouldn't be hard. You almost did it."

Her initial reaction was always the same: a brief moment of shock that stiffened her whole body. He would have thought she'd be used to the callous things he said. Then again, he wasn't even sure if he was used to them. The first few times she'd cried, but she seemed so much like Sakura it only made him angrier. Even when her shock changed to fury, her hard words and rough voice only pressed him further into combat with her. Somehow his darkness found an outlet in her and at the same time another source.

It was tiring.

She turned to him with her cup gripped tightly between her hands, steaming. Her ruined mouth was pressed into a tight, thin line. Her colourless lips for a moment looked just like the many pale scars that swathed the left side of her face. He stared back at her, felt his expression deepen and set into something almost cruel in response to hers.

"Well," she said tightly, "I had a much better reason for doing it than you. You... You don't even have a reason. You're just an ass." Her eyes were hard and narrow. "You aren't even a third of the man he was!"

Her tea cup shattered when she threw it into the sink, and she had disappeared from the room before the thin glass chips had fully settled. They still rocked musically against the other dishes when her door slammed.

* * *

The circles beneath her eyes seemed to visibly spread as she stared into the mirror, and she pressed her fingers to them. Did they make her look dedicated, or pathetic? She wasn't sure. Sakura tilted her head, looked a second longer, and then turned away. Appearance, she thought, wouldn't count. Not for Tsunade. It would be her eagerness, the determination in her voice, the confidence in her back, that would make the Hokage listen and take a chance.

Her research was complete; as complete as it could get. The notebook she held in her hands felt curiously light, insubstantial, despite all of the work she'd put into it. "She'll see, though." Sakura paused as she slid the notebook into her bag, surprised that she'd spoken aloud.

The past few months she'd worked hard. Harder than she had in a long while, if she wanted to be honest with herself. She couldn't stop. She tried to sleep and found her eyes twitching behind her lids, still reading through passage after passage of medical text. Walking through the city in the early morning, she dissected people down to their parts; she filled out reports sightlessly, her mind churning over her notes instead of such and such's last name, birthdate, and complaint. What had so occupied her over in the years of Sasuke's absence, of Naruto's? Nothing. She'd spent her days absorbed in minute tasks and worries; self-pity; her life seemed only to be a laundry list of daily trifles and innumerable, forgotten activities.

For a moment Sakura stared out of her window and saw the world around her clearly: the stained concrete walls, tile roofs in the distance, parapets and towers, doors and windows and curtains half open. What did she have to show for the years that she lived?

She picked up her bag and it seemed to hold nothing. In the darkening office, the bag grew too heavy for her sweaty palms to grip; she dropped it loudly onto the ground and interrupted the silence. Tsunade finally blinked, releasing her from her gaze. She lifted her chin incrementally and took in an audible breath.

"Let me see the rest," she said quietly, and Sakura picked up the bag and slid it across the desk.

* * *

The first night Ino had written: "He ate nothing. He drank nothing. Condition? He's an ASS ASS ASS ASS ASS" until her hand cramped, and she tore the page from the notebook Tsunade had given her, crumbled it, and then tore it to pieces and threw it in the direction of his room. Now, her entries had grown shorter: "No change from yesterday." She dutifully wrote down everything she had put onto the table in front of him, and the amount he'd eaten. It was never much, and nights always seemed the same, routine down to her dreams.

She dreamed more often now, uneasily. Something else that was Naruto's fault, no doubt. Ino stared at the ceiling after she woke, wiping the strange, hot tears from eyes and wondering why she hadn't become used to it by now. He always said the same things, anyway.

How long ago had he died? Two years? Three? She pressed her wrist across the bridge of her nose and her lips and eyes shut tightly. As if she didn't know. Two years, 8 months, and 12 days. Her breath was shaky in the silence of her room and the darkness of the ceiling seemed to morph continuously in her vision. Sometimes she dreamt of the sound: that ragged breath, the gasping. This was the dream that made her wake in a cold sweat, made her heart race and her breath hitch. Sometimes she dreamt of the day they'd taken off the bandages, and the shock of seeing the stranger in her reflection; then the relief that came of thinking that maybe it was a fair trade off: his life for her face. As if her stupid, ugly face would be an even trade for him.

Tonight, the battle replayed itself perfectly in her head. The details seemed sharper even, the emotions hit harder. She struggled to wake and couldn't. Her eyes roved but the scene was immovable, unchangeable; she tried to shout but there was only silence. In the end it happened as it had: they lost.

And even before she could see through the blood in her eyes, she knew he was dead. His body was thin, wasted; he'd given everything. She tried to speak his name but her mouth didn't work properly. She pressed her fingers to his neck and convinced herself that the faint echo of her own heartbeat was his. "Chouji," she managed, but he didn't answer. His face was marred with blood that she recognized as her own, but she didn't have time for herself.

Where was Shikamaru?

She pressed her hands to the gaping wound in his thigh, but his body didn't respond. The chakra flowed in and floundered, leaked out as if it were blood. "Chouji," she said. She wondered if she'd lost an eye; why couldn't she see clearly? "Chouji." She poured herself into him until she could no longer deny it. And where was Shikamaru? She stood, shakily. When she called his name red mist exploded in a cloud through her teeth. Her vision was black, clouded, black, clear, clouded, clouded, clear – and she saw him.

He would have looked as if he were sleeping, if not for the blood in his nose, his mouth, creeping down from his hairline. His heartbeat sluggishly beneath her fingers. She held her hands over him.

Her vision was black.

In the darkness, Ino sat up and threw off her bed covers. She watched the sun rise through her open window as she stood shivering in front of it. Smoke rose like breath from her mouth.

* * *

It was morning, and still Tsunade had found no reason to say no, no flaw. Every diagrams, the painfully detailed notes, the carefully annotated illustrations of each process, the painstakingly analayzed tissue samples – with each piece of evidence a tentative and shivering hope grew in the back of her head. But as soon as Sakura entered the room, pale faced, dark eyed, looking small and bent, Tsunade knew: it wouldn't work.

"Sakura," she began.

"Tsunade." She paused in the middle of the room. Her voice barely carried to Tsunade's chair. "Have you had enough time..?"

Tsunade's eyes fell to the bag that sat on her desk, and she pushed it forward. "You've done excellent research," said quietly, and from the corner of her eye she saw Sakura's hands fist and her head lift. "But it will be too late."

Sakura flinched. "No," she said suddenly. "No, there's still a chance--."

"He'd never agree to something involving you. And by the time he's sufficiently healthy enough to withstand the procedure..." Tsunade broke off. "Even now, it's too late. It's been six months, and he's done nothing to improve his chances."

"Tsunade, please. Please, it could work..." It was easy to hear the thickening in her voice.

"Do you think I like saying it?" Tsunade asked softly. "He isn't trying anymore. He doesn't care. If he won't try to help himself, there's only so much we can do." She swallowed, closed her eyes, pushed out the trembling in her throat with a sigh. "Sakura," she said, "stop crying."

But she wouldn't. "Please try," she wept. "Please, please, let's just try."

It wasn't against her nature to hope.

* * *

The relief Ino felt when he disappeared into the hospital was written in her body: in the loosening of the tightness in her face, her arms, her shoulders. Her breath streamed white into the winter air. She was tired and breakfast sat like a stone in her stomach; her nose wouldn't stop running. She imagined going home and sleeping, because she never dreamt in the daytime and who the hell cared to leave their home for flowers in the godforsaken cold? She turned away from the hospital and toward home, toward a bed, toward silence.

And then suddenly Sakura was there.

"Stay," she said. Her green eyes were riveted to the hospital doors, into which Naruto had disappeared. "I have something to tell you."

* * *

Sakura sat with her hands folded over one another, limp in her lap. Ino watched her eyes trace over the tiled floor, as if reading lines of text there. She hesitantly took in her breath, glancing toward the heavy wooden doors that separated Tsunade's office from the hall. Inside, she presumed, Tsunade was trying to convince Naruto to try the procedure. She didn't hear arguing, but she wasn't optimistic.

"Sakura." She sighed into the silence. "He's really bitter." The green eyes stopped roving a moment and flickered upward. Ino looked away and clarified. "Naruto, he's bitter and contrary. I don't think he'd take the surgery if he knew you were doing it." She kneaded the winter-dried skin between her pinky and ring finger. "He'd refuse it just to spite you."

"Tsunade won't tell him," she answered. Her voice was stronger than Ino had heard it to be in months. "And he'll take it. He has to. I'm already preparing for the next step." Her hands were fists on her knees. "Surgery on his spinal column. With his hara untangled, we can use chakra to repair it." She dropped her suddenly steady gaze to her hands. "I need to work on my control. Tsunade may not be able to do it alone. It's an exhausting procedure."

From the doors there was a sudden bark, muffled, the beginnings of an argument. Ino stared, her jaws flexing. "He doesn't care anymore." Her eyes narrowed. Again, just this morning, a fight. He'd pushed a bowl of hot cereal onto the floor. The nerve. Her hand fisted on her thigh. "Ass."

"He's not like that without reason," Sakura said quietly. She looked away from the door. "He's just as angry as you were. People deal with it different ways."

Ino tightened her crossed arms over her chest. There was an ache growing there. "I was never angry."

"Then you were sad," Sakura said. "He's in pain too."

As if his pain could ever be as acute as hers. Ino's fingers tightened against skin of her bent elbows. "Who died, then?" She couldn't keep the malice from her voice; it surprised her, echoing in the hall.

* * *

"You'll need to work very hard," Tsunade interrupted him, "to make up for the time you've wasted."

"You said there was no way to fix it." His throat was raw and dry. "You told me there was nothing you could do." If she looked at him any more with those _eyes— _full of patience and pity – he was going to lose it again. He set his jaw and his teeth creaked in protest.

"I said we didn't know how to. But we've been working all of this time. I told you more than once how hard we were working."

"We." Naruto's eyes narrowed. "We."

Tsunade lifted her chin. "Sakura has been doing nothing but clerical work since that incident." She shifted in her chair. "Would you refuse if she'd worked on it? Would you waste yourself just to spite her?"

"I don't want anything to do with her. I don't want anything from her." Naruto swept his thumb over the chapped skin of his index finger. With each pass there was a faint jolt of pain. He stared at his hand. "What is there to waste, anyway?" he mumbled. "I'm already wasted."

Tsunade's breath was audible from across the room. She shifted again, shuffled some papers on her desk, took another breath, and paused. "Naruto."

He turned his eyes to the window.

"Naruto, if you're healthier by the end of this month, we can try. I know that this can work if you try hard enough. And even if it's too late to get you walking again--."

He stared out over the city, hidden beneath a grey snow and shrouded in fog. It seemed like spring would never come. "You told me two months ago it was over. It's useless." He threw up his hands, encased in the window. "Fuck it all," he said.

* * *

The walk home wasn't tense. Ino wasn't sure what had happened with him, but, for her, it was Sakura's words that separated her from the world; the cold and wind was something she couldn't begin to understand when her mind was focused on her anger.

People continued to make concessions for him, even after all he'd done. She'd heard whispers of his falling out with Kakashi. Iruka rang her house once or twice but Naruto would never talk, just like he hadn't when Iruka called Sakura's, and gradually the only phone calls he got were from Tsunade. Hinata came to the house long ago with Kiba, but he refused to leave his room. Even with her enormous stomach she looked so frail and pitiful, crying on the porch. Kiba refused to let her visit again, and to that all Ino could do was nod in agreement.

_He's sad._ Ino slid her eyes toward him, but all she saw was apathy in his features; that and fury, the only faces he showed her with any regularity.

Maybe in the beginning, before he'd moved in with her and she'd seen him for what he was, she felt empathy for him. That's the whole reason she offered her room, after all, even though it was full of boxes of photos and his clothes, his chess set. Now all she could muster up was pity, and her pity wasn't so profound as her empathy.

He had a right to be angry, she'd give him that. A right to be bitter. But his bitterness was too far from her own realm to understand, and she didn't care to know him anymore.

Naruto mumbled something as they reached the porch – "I won't eat" is what it sounded like, and she couldn't pretend to be surprised. The longer they stayed together, the more she hated to see him use the ramp; the one she'd had built for Shikamaru. The one he'd never used. She hated the fact that it was Naruto's face she saw every morning.

She just hated the way her life had turned out.

* * *

_Try harder. _It was easy for everyone to say, but they didn't feel the weakness in his torso, didn't get light headed when their eyes tried to run across a page. His books sat unread on the windowsill and his suitcase laid still unpacked. But what was the point? He wasn't going anywhere.

Ino slammed cupboards in the kitchen and he threw his clothes in a pile in the closet, and then threw his suitcase across the room. The effort made his vision grey around the edges. What did she have to be pissed about? She was never that beautiful to begin with and Shikamaru went out protecting her. What had she lost?

It was a struggle to get into bed, but sleep was nearly black, and almost without sensation.

When Naruto opened his eyes the hot ache in his chest had not yet dissipated. Shapes became visible in the darker corners of the room, past the brighter moonlight that glowed against his wrinkled sheets. For a moment he laid, shifting his eyes and trying to hold onto his dream. Who was he speaking with? The remainder slipped away before he managed to grasp it.

The house was quiet; as he listened even the ticking of the clock on the opposite wall seemed loud and gigantic in comparison to the silence. If he didn't know better, he could imagine it filled the whole room. Beside him, the chair sat quietly, softly lit, as if to grab his attention.

He hated it. He hated the way his life had turned out, the way his body had turned on him, the way Sakura had turned on him. His body was his enemy, and though the chair could hardly hope to replace what he'd relied on all of his life, he was suddenly defined by it. He could do nothing without it.

Naruto leaned out toward his chair, fingers grazing the plastic armrest. It was cold and alien as his dead legs, and he couldn't help saying aloud: "This is pathetic." His voice was strange in the darkness and he pushed himself toward the bedside, staring at the chair, its form ghostly in the muted light of the window; he wanted to wreck it. He reached forward, further, his fingers tense and outstretched. The chair, his life, everything was hard, too hard now.

Falling was easier.

* * *

The crashing was what forced her eyes open, but for the first disorienting moments of her lucidity the night seemed like part of a dream. She clutched at a body that was only a pillow. Her heart beat in her ears and she grasped at the night table for a knife. There was only a half empty pack of cigarettes that she crushed in her flapping hand. It was the cold air and the second crash – loudly from the hallway, from Naruto's room – that fully woke her.

The possibilities raced through her head; he was destroying her property; he was hurting himself; someone had come into the house – Sakura maybe. She thought she heard him call out in pain over the sound of something falling; an awkward, cut off noise. The knob that she was suddenly grasping in both hands didn't budge. Locked.

Of course.

The silence seemed abrupt and she shook the doorknob again though she knew it wouldn't turn. "Open it!" Ino shouted. Her breath masked all sound. "What's wrong? Open it!"

When she pressed her shoulder to the wood it popped from its frame, lower hinge splintering. The sound was harsh and abrasive in her ears, and the aftermath was too quiet. For a moment everything was too bright; she narrowed her eyes, looking away, fingers still on the light switch. The scene came to her between blinks: Naruto on the floor, legs awkwardly bent, head hidden in his arms. His neck was tense and when she touched him, felt his fluttering pulse, she realized he was awake. Her eyes skittered over him. The glass that littered the rug, the blood spatter on his arm; there was too much too look at. His chair sat canted upward, handles pushed through the wall, her lamp laid shattered on the floor, and Naruto lifted his head. The raw cut on his cheekbone wept blood and was already turning black. "What did you do?" she asked. It was all she could think to say.

"I can't stand it." His throat pulsed, working to control his voice. He suddenly reached out, lunging, and grasped a wheel in his fingers, ripping the chair from the wall. It fell sideways and scraped a swath of paint free. "I can't live with this fucking chair!" Blood speckled the cloth of his pants and Ino clasped at his knee. The floor was littered with red glass.

"Don't move." She grasped his bloody wrist tightly before he could press it again to the ground and try to sit up. "What the hell did you _do?_"

The hand over his eyes slipped down and probed at the cut on his cheek, glistening beneath his hard, dark eyes. "This? This is nothing! When has something..." he broke off, voice shaking. That voice; it didn't match his face, or the hard look upon it. "When has something like this stopped me?" He pulled his fingers away and blood rushed from the wound.

"Stop moving!" Ino pressed her sleeve roughly to his bleeding cheek. Broken glass, a ruined wall, the upended near a torn lampshade, bloodstained sheets. _I've had enough_, she wanted to say. _This is it. _But his hand was grasping at her wrist.

"When has something like this stopped me?" he asked again, and this time his voice was quiet, his face suddenly tired. Ino hesitantly opened her mouth. His eyes were unnaturally bright; they stayed wide and fixed on hers, even as his face began to crumble.

"Never," she answered firmly. It seemed the only thing to say. The right thing. His fingers, still on her wrist, relaxed. His bloodied hand lifted and he pressed it tightly against his eyes.

He took a shuddering breath and cried.


	9. Chapter 8

Naruto watched her pass, lowering his arm. Beneath his bandages he felt a scab near his wrist stretch and crack . His head pounded; he could feel the blood course through his cheek. He'd thought about asking for something (an aspirin, tea, _something_) but there was an obvious tenseness in Ino's shoulders as she washed dishes – pausing to consider his empty plate – that prevented him from saying anything. Not that he hadn't noticed it before; he knew she'd had enough of him, had known it for most of the month. At this point, he thought, even existing in the same room was enough for him to antagonize her. He shrugged on his jacket with a certain heaviness.

It had become too easy to feel ashamed. His body was slower, tired; something had left. The sense that he might try to start again was overwhelmed last night by the sense that he'd gone too far, strayed away from some ideal he'd kept for himself. _It's too late. It's too late. _The words circled in his head as he laid awake in bed thinking, and his regret was somehow more exhausting than his fury had been. He thought about Kakashi and Sasuke, Tsunade and Hinata, Ino. He couldn't remember the exact words he'd said to them, or the exact look he'd had on his face; all that remained was the vague knowledge that he'd done something terrible to every single one of them, and that he was alone, and back where he started years ago as a good-for-nothing kid.

The walk to the hospital was quiet. Ino stayed ahead, her face turned toward the ground, and Naruto found himself staring at her shoes and trying to concentrate on the sound they made on the dirt road. It was hard -- trying to stop his mind from automatically turning to reflection in the absence of conversation – and he'd had enough of it last night. He stared at her feet until their sound permeated his mind to the exclusion of everything else.

Things were going to change.

* * *

"You'll have to work hard," Tsunade said, removing a bandage. "But I've told you that before."

Naruto wrinkled his nose, smelling the sticky salve Shizune had opened. She smiled brightly at him. "He'll do it." She touched a swab to the contents of the jar. "Right?"

He nodded slightly and forced the corners of his mouth upward. "If I can."

Tsunade noisily grabbed a pair of scissors from the tray at the foot of Naruto's bed. "He's lost 20 pounds, Shizune." Her lips were thin and her eyes sharp as they swept over the room. "He'd be in much better shape if he hadn't wasted so much time. If he can, he says. If it's possible is what he should say."

Shizune turned her face uneasily back to Naruto. He shrugged slightly, the corner of his mouth tightening and screwing down.

"If it's possible, then," he said quietly.

Tsunade raised a brow, cutting a bandage. "I still don't understand." She pressed her lips still harder together and shook her head slightly as she covered his leg. "This sudden change in attitude. Where did it come from?"

"I was struck with a realization this morning," Naruto mumbled. He shrugged when her face turned to regard him.

She looked pointedly at the gash on his bruised cheek. "Was that on purpose, or did you not feel it, either?" She wiped her hands, turning away. "Shizune, his folder is on my desk. Could you bring it?"

Naruto stared at her back. He hadn't seen her without a frown on her face since he came back. Watching her now she seemed bent, as if something was slowly pulling her down by the shoulders. He'd lost all of the violence that made him able to see past and now it was all he was able to pay attention to: the tired fall of her shoulders, the incessant wrinkle beside her tightened mouth.

Tsunade had taken a chart into her hands and as the door closed she pressed a pen to the paper, writing hurriedly, her brows knit. Naruto suddenly wished she were standing closer, close enough for him to touch her hand, apologize properly, but somehow he felt removed. A strange heat crept into the lower reaches of his stomach and he realized how lonely he felt. When had so many empty spaces opened up around him?

"Baa-chan, I'm sorry." It didn't come out as softly as he wanted; he blurted the words, and after they came out there was this strange sense of airlessness in his throat for the split second that he waited for her to acknowledge him.

The pen stopped and her face turned toward him. Still frowning. Naruto swallowed.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I... I'll do better..." The words, as they left his mouth, felt empty and brittle, lacking.

Tsunade lifted her chin and cleared her throat. "Nice words. I'll believe them when I see you making an effort." She looked down at the chart and suddenly blinked. "Your folder isn't on the desk; I put it away last night. Shizune won't find it."

In the moment that she came closer Naruto reached out to touch her hand that returned the chart to his bedside table. "Baa-chan..." He might have said something more, but there was a tear slipping free from the corner of her eye.

"You'll start today," she said quickly. She brushed his hand away and disappeared through the doorway.

* * *

The nurse that sat in front of him was reading a magazine he didn't recognize, one with a bright, gaudy cover and glossed pages.

"Is there anything good?" he asked.

"What?" She looked up, blinking.

"Any good gossip," he clarified. He leaned against the frame he was strapped in and looked down at his legs, held straight and immobile against the machine. He was sure he'd seen an illustration of the same thing in an old manual of torture devices.

The nurse shrugged. "I guess. I don't really read, I just look at the pictures."

The clock on the wall ticked too loudly in the silence. He hated clocks, especially when he was trying to sleep, or in rooms that were too quiet. Like this one. The nurse turned another page and Naruto took a frustrated breath. "How long do I have to stand in this?"

She looked up, her brows raised, and partially closed her magazine. "Why, are you feeling light-headed?"

"No." That much was a lie. "I'm just bored out of my mind." He pressed a hand against his chin, eyes roaming over the white walls. There was a low slung bicycle-like contraption in the corner and shelves of stapled pamphlets and rolled mats.

"That makes two of us, I guess," she answered. A door opened and she fully closed the magazine and stood, straightening her skirt with a quick hand and holding the other behind her back. "Tsunade-sama."

Naruto craned his neck and managed to catch sight of the Hokage. "How long do I stand in this thing?" he asked, curling his lip.

"You're tired already, I guess," she said, crossing her arms beneath her chest.

"No." His brows creased defensively and he looked away her from, forcing the fidgety annoyance from his limbs. "I'm just bored."

Tsunade sighed and touched her hand to his arm as she pulled his wheelchair closer. "Get used to it, because you'll be doing it for three hours everyday." She bent and pressed her hand to his leg for a moment. "I can already tell your leg circulation has improved."

Naruto's mouth widened into a frown. "I guess that's worth three hours of boredom."

"You read a lot." The Hokage pulled at the straps against his chest. "If I took a frame over to Yamanaka's, would you use it? The book would keep you occupied."

He took in his breath. "I guess." Tsunade looked up, hazel eyes narrowed, and he glanced away from her, his mouth tightening. "I said, 'yes'." He smiled, stiff-lipped. It was a fall back he hadn't used in a long time.

* * *

The days had become much more quiet. He ate all the food she put in front of him without a word and woke before the shrill ringing of the phone, or Tsunade's equally grating demands, reached his ears. He was often awake before her, and she wondered if he woke before the sun even rose; some nights she came to with a start, as if hearing something in her sleep: his chair creaking in the hall, the sound of a glass being placed in the sink.

Everyday the outlook outside of her home seemed to become brighter. "He's gaining weight," Shizune would say with a smile, passing her in the hall. "There's definite improvement in his circulation," Tsunade said, and the hope in her voice was evident when she handed over a book full of exercises and strengthening activities. "I think I can cut down his recovery to two months. That's two months we gain for the next surgery," Sakura said, and, despite the circles beneath them, her eyes were always bright these days.

The hardness in his eyes became less haggard and the tight set of his jaw became introspective more than combative, and even so she couldn't keep her mind from turning back to the previous months, couldn't prevent the distaste she now held for him; it felt something like grade school, when everyone hated him vaguely, teased him at the swings and she knew it was wrong, that people were hard on him, and that she should have more empathy, more patience when he interrupted school lessons or flicked his lunch on a spoon across tables. Be the bigger person was the common phrase. Take the high road.

Still her stomach went heavy when she saw him.

* * *

Sasuke woke with a start, the air pressing from his lungs. Slowly his stiffened body relaxed, his skin running hot and then cold. He took in his breath, turning his head toward the chair beside him.

It was empty.

He would try to sit up, but already he was dizzy. The bed seemed to rotate as his eyes moved across the ceiling. It was no different than the other times he'd woken. Kakashi was in the room once, trying to talk to him, but he couldn't open his eyes for longer than a moment. He would pull the IV's out if it wasn't so difficult. He turned his head again, trying to find a position in which the blood would stop spinning behind his eyes, but it was useless. Everything was useless. He laid in bed and if it wasn't for the whooshing in his brain, he might have been wooden, inanimate. Just filler in the universe.

Sasuke closed his eyes and the sounds in the room grew around him. Heels outside the door, the click click click of the doorknob as it turned. He opened his eyes and the room tipped. A nurse appeared above him, his chart held close to her chest. She reached up towards the tubes beside him but then retracted her hand, glancing at page, double checking. She's too young to be doing this, he thought. His brow creased. She'll make a mistake. His shaking gaze roamed over her face. Her eyes were green.

Sakura?

He opened his mouth slightly but the name didn't come out. He narrowed his eyes, trying to bring her into better focus, but the ceiling constantly captured his attention, spinning, shuddering. Sakura. Selfish. Clinging. What other names could he have for her? Good for nothing. Idiot.

The nurse smiled slightly at him, seeing he was awake, and wrote carefully on his chart. The pencil she carried had no eraser. She made too many mistakes. Idiot. He wanted to strangle that stupid, manipulative smile off her face. His fingers twitched and he reached out.

The bed spun as she fell against his bed, smacking him in the face with the chart. There was a handful of her skirt in his hand. It was crisp and starched and for some reason it reminded him of the shirts his mother kept in the hallway closet, folded and unused.

* * *

Kakashi was in the room again. Sasuke turned his gaze toward him with a strange, teetering motion of the head, as if his eyes were marbles that needed to be rolled. He took in his breath through his open mouth, his face slack. "These are my death throes," he said.

Kakashi's brow lowered slightly over his dark eye. "You're almost well." He looked down at the clasped hands held loosely between his knees, then at the drip that hung beside Sasuke's bed. "You'd be feeling better if you hadn't--."

"Sakura." A quiet hiss interrupted as Sasuke lifted his head slightly, rolling his gaze toward the wall. "I thought she was Sakura."

Outside in the hall there were muffled footsteps; the loud opening and closing of a door. Kakashi had the beginning of a sentence on the tip of his tongue - "I wish..." he wanted to say, but it seemed pointless to finish the thought. He swallowed, shutting his mouth before the words could leave, and cleared them from his throat. "Once you're well, they'll take you for interrogation. Probably in a month and a half." He looked down at his hands again. "That's the time frame Tsunade gave in her report."

Sasuke listened impassively, his brow slightly knotted. "What did we do..." he started quietly. Kakashi lifted his head, and in shifting he hardly heard the last part of the sentence. "...to end up like this?" The Uchiha's dark eyes narrowed slightly. "Even Naruto. To have been stupid enough to fall in love with her..." His forehead smoothed and his eyes bounced between two invisible points on the wall. "He must have done something unforgivable."

Once, his team had seemed full of promise. Kakashi leaned back, pressing the cold fingers of a hand to the back of his neck. In hindsight, it was in the darkest times that they shone. Maybe it was hardly a glow, a shimmer, a brief flash that he'd seen. How many ties – invisible to his eyes, unknown to him – bound them together?

_What happened to all of you?_ He'd said it more to himself, the words hidden in an unreadable sigh, but Sasuke turned his head, hearing. His mouth twisted. "We're all idiots," he said. "One without faith, one without a heart, and one without common sense." His dark eyes thinned, his lashes falling over them as if to veil his thoughts. "We were doomed the second we met."

Kakashi's hand dropped to his bent knee. "Hm," he sighed. "Or that's just how we let it turn out."

They sat quietly in the room. The present seemed hazy and too indefinite in comparison to the past.

"They'll execute me when they're done." Sasuke shut his eyes completely, and tilted his head back toward the ceiling. "I'm guessing."

Kakashi paused. "No. Probably not." He watched the slow depression of the Uchiha's chest beneath the hospital blanket. It jumped suddenly, in time with an abrupt, flat laugh.

"I almost hope they do," he said, in wonder, as if he hardly believed the thought himself. The blanket rose as he inhaled. "I'm tired."

"Tired." The older man breathed the word and suddenly understood.

Sasuke swallowed. "Naruto."

"They're hoping to schedule a surgery next week." Kakashi watched the Uchiha's raised brow. "They've researched his problem extensively. They're fairly certain he'll regain his chakra circulation. Whether he walks again..."

Sasuke's eyes closed; a wheeze like a laugh escaped his lips. "I want to see him," he said.

Leaving, Kakashi wondered if he should convey the request. From what he heard from Tsunade, Naruto's turnaround was so abrupt it would be hard to think of it as anything but a tentative endeavor, easily subject to moods. Sasuke wouldn't be the best influence. But who was he to try and control these things?

The decision seemed made, anyway; Naruto had been a ghost for weeks -- all the information came from second hand sources when it came to his student, now. He decided: if he saw him, which he wouldn't, he would relay Sasuke's wishes. If not, it was someone else's problem. Kakashi laid his visitor's card at the front desk and lifted his head.

Through the front doors he saw Naruto's bundled form, puffing white.

* * *

When Naruto sighed his breath rose above him in a light cloud, visible for a second before the wind blew it past his face and behind him. He glanced at the sky and then back at the road. It was late and Ino was too. The snow that fell past the hospital roof was accumulating against the curb and he watched a child on the other side of the street molding snowballs as he crouched outside a shop, waiting for someone.

"Why don't you wait inside?"

Naruto inhaled, surprised at the voice suddenly beside him. He cleared his throat. "The air is better out here."

Kakashi pushed his hands into his pockets, shifting his feet. "You aren't cold?"

His lips twitched into a slight smile. "Not cold enough to complain." He looked up toward his teacher. "I haven't seen you in a while." There was an apology building painfully in his throat, but he couldn't bring himself to release it.

A cloud of breath rose over Kakashi's head and he paused, staring at the sidewalk. Another cloud rose and disappeared. And finally, mercifully, he spoke. "Sasuke woke up early this morning." He dropped his eye toward his feet. "Bruised up a nurse."

Naruto's mouth tightened.

"He wants to talk to you," Kakashi continued. "Maybe you should go. His situation is precarious." He paused, fixing his eyes on the little boy across the road, crushing snow in his gloveless hands. "He may have to leave soon."

The air seemed too humid when he pushed himself back inside. His nose ran and his fingers prickled uncomfortably with the sudden change of temperature. The first misgivings he had manifested themselves in the tickle that rose in his throat as he pushed open the door. Sasuke's face turned toward him and he swallowed, then coughed, but the scratching only grew worse. He coughed again as the door closed behind him. The Uchiha's eyes were hard and narrow.

"I knew about you," he said. His words were all strung together, melting into one another.

Naruto's greeting went empty on his lips; the air that would have formed a "hello" passed into the room silently.

"I knew about you." Sasuke's eyes swept over Naruto's face in the pause, left to right, as if he was reading. "You and her."

Naruto took in his breath and his words came out evenly spaced and clipped, as if automatic. "Why didn't you say anything?"he asked quietly.

"I was happy when I finally knew," Sasuke continued. His lashes quivered a moment, as if he would blink, but his stare only grew more intense. As Naruto watched his eyes seemed to grow larger, darker. "I thought..." He laughed slightly, or exhaled. "This could turn out to be OK, I thought. I can leave, you can have her; she must have feelings for you..."

Naruto shifted in his chair and looked away. Sasuke's dark eyes consumed his face.

"It isn't the first time I've been stupid," he finished.

"This isn't worth talking about." Naruto licked his lips; the air was dry, too dry, even as his shoulders washed hot and then cold with a sudden, sullen sweat. His eyes found the window and he stared out toward the roofs until they all seemed to coagulate in his sun-struck vision. He cleared his throat. "What does it matter, anymore? You warned me; I didn't listen. It's done." He swallowed. "You didn't have to hit her like you did."

Sasuke head twitched on his neck. "So you're already forgiving her?" He finally shifted his eyes away with a scoff and Naruto, free of the his searching gaze, silently released his pent up breath. Sasuke inhaled, exhaled, dropped his head back on the pillow. "Sakura. Do you know what she said?" he asked, his hot eyes now directed at the door, half cracked. "When I told her I was leaving? When I told her you still loved her, and that she would be happier with you?"

"We don't have to talk about Sakura." Naruto closed his eyes, opened them on his knees, then looked away toward the floor. "She's out of my life."

"Liar." Sasuke's head shifted on the pillow. "She's the one doing the surgery. She's the one who did all the research. You know that, don't you? When that's done she'll have paid her debt, and then it's over." His head shook again, turned itself toward the wall. "Never, she said." His voice dropped. "She said, 'I never loved him.'"

* * *

"This patient isn't allowed general visitors."

Ino jumped, her hand leaving the door, and glanced at the nurse who'd so quietly come to stand beside her. It was a younger one she didn't know, with thin features and an immovable face. She nodded twice, only half apologetically: "I was just coming to get..."

Her eyes shifted to the door -- the conversation in the room had stopped -- and as the nurse fully opened it Naruto, head turned blankly to the window, and Sasuke, reclined in his hospital bed, eyes closed, jaw slackening, came into view.

"We don't have to talk about her? Everything you are is related to her." His voice was flat and nearly inaudible. "Pathetic."

Naruto was a high-shouldered statue.

"Visiting hours are over," the nurse called.

"Fine." He moved suddenly, hands fumbled at his wheels. "I was leaving anyway."

Ino pressed herself against the door jamb to make room for the nurse and stood awkwardly after she'd left, staring at her shoes until Naruto slipped through the doorway. "Tsunade said you were here," she said quickly, as if she needed to explain her presence. "I was looking for you." Even with her lowered gaze she saw, as they hurried through the hall, the redness that rose into his face, just beneath his eyes.

She was acutely embarrassed by his pain; embarrassed to have witnessed it and for some reason she couldn't name.

"Tsunade said you've gained seven pounds." They emerged into the cold air and Ino caught her breath. "I thought ...we might eat out to celebrate." As she said the words she pressed her hands to her coat packet and breathed a sigh of relief – her wallet was there. How much money it held was another matter. Naruto didn't stop. His breath escaped in quick, audible clouds.

"Every fucking thing I've done has been for nothing," he said. A little boy in the snow-covered street straightened upon hearing the heated words; he watched after until they turned the corner, a half-made snowball ignored in his hand. Ino pulled her eyes from him and fixed them again on Naruto.

She caught the handle of his chair. "Just wait a second," she said, and wondered why his moods suddenly mattered. In the moment that it took him to stop and look at her, she analyzed the reasons behind her sudden intrusiveness, her sudden concern. The first was, because if he was unhappy, he'd stop trying; and if he stopped trying, he'd never get better; and if he never got better, he'd never leave.

No matter how much she'd hated it before, his presence made her realize how much she treasured solitude.

"What do you mean, for nothing?" she asked. Naruto tilted his chin and she stared at the rough line of his cheekbone, the hard set of his mouth, and was quiet.

At the far corner of the street hung a banner advertising noodles and she stepped toward it. "There's a noodle restaurant over there," she said at length. "My treat." Naruto paused; swallowing, thinking, remembering – she didn't know what. But she felt the strangest sense of relief when he finally spoke.

"Soba," he said quietly, and blinked. "I haven't had soba in a long time." He lifted his eyes to her for a brief second. "Thank you," he said.

* * *

"It was because I needed a friend as much as anything" was what he wanted to say, why he entered the room in the first place. Maybe he could manage to say "I'm sorry for choosing her over you." But in the end he couldn't. Would it matter? Sakura said it all of the time, so many times – "I'm sorry." Had he accepted it?

"It was because you knew, knew everything, had me pinpointed" was what he might have said, after "I'm sorry," but he couldn't say it. That pause, just before Kakashi turned down the street and he toward the hospital; couldn't he have blurted it, quickly? Would it have been enough? If it was sincere, true, honest; if it was that and the exact opposite of those words which Sakura had so often plied him with?

I love you, I'm sorry, I'm happy, she said. Never, Sasuke said.

But when he said _I'm sorry_, he would mean it.

Ino's face was hard to read, if not because of the hair in her eyes and the scars, because of its blankness. She chewed mechanically, her wrist resting on the table and her eyes unfocused, turned toward a window.

Naruto would look longer, try to identify the inscrutable emotion on it, but he didn't want to stare. There were three children already doing so, noodles hanging lazily from their slightly open mouths. He cleared his throat and their mother looked at him, her children, then quickly turned red and pinched the child nearest to her until she'd forced his attention back to his dinner. Ino blinked, slid her eyes to the children and the embarrassed mother who refused to meet her gaze. She smiled slightly at her noodles, the corner of her mouth twisting, and Naruto looked away before she could see that he'd been staring as well. His eyes traversed the table, as if reading the words he'd prepared. They were good, he thought. As good as an overdue apology could be.

Ino took a breath. "They were gawking at me," she said quietly, leaning forward. "Not you. You don't have to look so self-conscious."

Naruto cleared his throat. "I wasn't," he started. "I was..."

She rested her wrist on the table, chopsticks held loosely in her hand, waiting for him to finish his sentence. Instead he pushed a wad of noodles into his mouth and resumed his study of the laminate beneath the glass, and wondered more about what words to say, and in what order. "I had something to say," he managed at last, swallowing. His bowl was empty and there was nothing more to occupy him. "I _have_ something to say."

Ino's eyes narrowed the slightest bit.

"_I've_ _had_ something to say," he clarified again, paused, and was silent. She placed her chopsticks on the napkin beside her bowl and crossed her arms. He was glad for the din in the tiny restaurant: chopsticks on dishes; loud men on lunch break, sniffing and coughing courtesy of the cold weather; the cook laughing behind the counter. It almost masked his words.

He said: "I've taken advantage of you," he said slowly. "I've taken advantage of your hospitality and your understanding. I've tested your patience. Whether there's a reason for it... I... I feel like you'd understand more than me."

Ino suddenly shifted in her seat. "Look, we can talk later--."

"I broke things," he interrupted. "I broke things, I know, I... I wasted a lot of food. And I'm sorry for that. But what I want to take back most are the things I said, because I knew what I was saying and I knew that bringing up your history would hurt.." His hand came up to touch at the hair on his forehead, drew itself nervously to his jaw, then dropped. "I hurt you on purpose, and I'm sorry. You have to know, he was important to me, too."

He lifted his head in time to watch a single tear run unimpeded down her cheek. Its appearance shocked him; she was two different people, crying and dry-eyed; scarred and not. She clasped a hand over the tear, halting its procession just before it reached the corner of her mouth.

"Wait," she said. She frowned hard at the table.

Naruto took in his breath, looked away, shifted. She reached for the napkin dispenser; he held it out to her; it was empty. "I'm sorry," he said again, helplessly.

He still held the dispenser out, frozen, when she dropped her head, hands tight over her face, and wept.

* * *


	10. Chapter 9

AN: Please read the author's note at the beginning of this story (it can be selected in the drop down chapters menu).

* * *

The snow began to melt. One morning Ino woke and the hill just beyond her house was showing green through her window. The roof was covered in shiny ice that dripped away throughout the day and the streets were wet in the sun. She pushed open the door to her shop and rehung the portraits over the entry way.

Sakura meant to clean up the pages that littered her tables, put them in a folder, order them in a file. But each time she picked up a sheet of notes she found herself staring at them, hunched over the table, peering at each word, waiting for something to click, blinking when she realized it was evening and dim. One morning she went out in her winter coat and saw everyone in knit jackets, and wondered when the weather had changed.

When Tsunade pressed her hand to Naruto's back her fingers could no longer easily trace the spaces between his ribs. One morning the flowers in the hospital atrium bloomed; he laughed suddenly and without reason; she tentatively filled a slot in the surgical calendar with his name.

As the days grew longer Naruto no longer woke in semi-darkness. The sun poured into his room as he sat doing exercises before breakfast. When he grew tired or upset he stared out the window and watched the frost melt in the light. One morning he had to squint to see his breath when they left the house, and the children on their way to school no longer wore mufflers. The days had passed quickly. They had less weight, was all he knew; things blurred and became monotonous but it was easy to continue, easy to fix his eyes on a point and tell himself to go.

The world was linear and without distractions, and Naruto felt the same sense of order and clarity that he remembered feeling as a child; the single minded watching of ants, endless summer days, pushing himself until he was breathless. He wanted to run again, and nothing else mattered.

No one else mattered.

Once he caught sight of Sakura in the hallway, in his view for a second, and he watched her over the damp towel that he held to his face and wondered where she was going; only until he realized that he didn't care. He couldn't care. There were more important things, more interesting things, and she was the past at a time when only progress was the only possible route for him. "Now is the time for cautious progress," the nurse had said, as if she was reading from a paper; the young one, who studied at every resting moment and smiled the rest of the time. "Cautious progress," she said, and took the towel from his hands to drape it over his head. "Cover your head before you catch a cold."

* * *

Sakura pulled her eyes away from the page. For a moment the human face in front of her was unrecognizable. How long had she stared into books, at notes, at featureless figures like maps, diagrammed and dissected, that she couldn't recognize Tsunade's face?

"I want you to sleep all of this week," she said, and Sakura blinked, uncomprehending. The pen in her hand bled onto her page, around her finger, eating away her notes.

"My next proposal," she said haltingly. "I still have to research..."

"I want you to rest this week," Tsunade continued. "And next week I want you to gather all of your notes and all of your sources, and I want you to give them to me."

A sound like choking escaped Sakura's mouth. "I thought," she stammered. "I thought we agreed..."

"The week after that-" Tsunade pressed a hand to her shoulder and bent "-you and I will meet with the rest of the staff assigned to Naruto's procedure. You're going to be explaining everything. You're going to be in the room, leading everybody. You will be rested, professional, and put-together through all of this. When it's over, you'll be researching again – under me, under my orders, under my lead." She paused and then loosened her hold on Sakura's stiff arm. "If you can do this, Sakura... Do you understand?"

Her breath escaped in a shaking sigh. "Yes," she whispered. Her hand suddenly rose and fitted itself against Tsunade's, cold-fingered and trembling. "Thank you," she said.

* * *

Tsunade told him not to come in anymore. "You have three weeks until your surgery. Do something fun. Do something relaxing. Talk to all of the people you've been ignoring."

The first few days he called. First Kakashi, then Iruka; Lee and Gai; Hinata. Until he phoned Hinata, he had the feeling that each time, apologizing was easier. He could hardly get the words out talking to Kakashi, but by the time he hung up with Gai the world had realigned itself; the aching knot of shame or nervousness in his chest had loosened. And then there was Hinata, and the baby crying in the background, and suddenly he didn't have the words anymore. Just hearing her voice – the apprehensive 'hello?' - a tightness grew beneath his collarbone and he lost the words. All he managed was to stutter out his name. She said, "I'm glad to hear from you." He slept easier that night.

But after the apologies, his days were boring. He could only exercise so long before he grew tired and lost interest. And – he could never say it out loud, especially not near Tsunade – he almost missed being watched all of the time. If the last few months of his life had been the most wretched he'd ever experienced, it was due in part, he knew, to a loneliness of his own construction. Now he seldom wanted to be alone in his room; when Ino returned from work he gravitated toward the rooms she was in, if only for want of company. She crossed her legs and her arms in the living room or at the dining table; it was late into the night before she ever laughed at any of his jokes.

Sometimes he saw a flash over her face, as if she only just realized she was relaxing, slouching in her seat or leaning toward him. Then her mouth would set, her shoulders would stiffen. All he could do was smile, laugh, and hope she understood he was apologizing.

* * *

At night Ino slept. Maybe it was because the days were less cold and her feet were no longer blocks of ice under the blankets. Maybe it was because Naruto no longer spoke with her only to argue. Maybe it was because she had long talks with people she hadn't talked to in forever – people who came by to talk about Naruto, to ask about him, to say they'd gotten a call - and talking at some point had become tiring. At night she slept and she didn't dream.

In the middle of the second week they sat at the table and it was an ordinary morning. Naruto coughed into his fisted hand several times. A grain of rice escaped his mouth and he picked it up in a napkin after Ino had stared at it long enough. She looked away and to the watch on her wrist, then stood, patting at her pockets for her keys.

"I'm off, then," she said, just as she'd said every day since Tsunade's imposed period of rest; it was developing into a routine, and she expected Naruto would twist his lip and grudgingly lift his hand to say "see you later." As the days passed the solitude of the day seemed to chafe more and more visibly at him, and Ino, having spent so much time making sure he had his space, was unsure of what to do with him. She felt uncomfortable when he tried to make jokes and was wary of the participating in the long conversations he attempted. He was too casual, now, and at times Ino found herself bristling at his smile and thinking, "I haven't even accepted your apology yet."

But perhaps that's why he tried so hard to close the distance between them.

"I was thinking I'd go with you." Naruto tapped his spoon against his bowl.

Ino paused in the midst of pulling on her shoes. "Why?" was all she could think to say. He rubbed at the back of his head and smothered a cough. She tugged the back of her shoe from beneath her heel. "Fine," she said at length, and wondered why inviting him along was so difficult. Work had been her haven from him, and even now that he was almost pleasant to be around, she found herself wanting to maintain the freedom and isolation she found there.

"It might be fun," he said, and whether he was trying to reassure her or himself, Ino wasn't sure.

They spoke little on the first day. He ambled around the store and through the back room, greeted a few customers, and then sat sighing when no one entered. She tried to explain the meaning of one flower, the occasions for which another might be sold, but he listened with blank eyes and then disappeared until near closing time, coming back with stories of Iruka's boy and how the school had changed since they were young. The second day was largely the same, except that he caught her watering plants and offered to do it for her.

"I just sat around yesterday," he said. "It was no different from being at home." He took the watering can and promptly drowned the orchids, which Ino didn't realize until the third day when she found them wilting in the morning.

"Do you know how expensive these are?" she asked, and he wrinkled his lip uncomfortably.

"Well, what do they _mean?" _he asked, as if hoping she would launch into an explanation and forget what she was angry with him.

Truthfully, she did forget occasionally. The more time she passed with him the less the prior months entered her thoughts. He had an endless repertoire of jokes, and though she'd heard most of them before they were somehow newly funny when he recited them for her or their customers. He flirted with the grandmotherly women who came in, and steered the few hapless males who entered toward the most expensive arrangements the store offered. The women came the next day, and the next, and called him 'sonny'. Each time he convinced them to buy lavender and Queen Anne's Lace for their tables, or tiny arrangements for the kitchen window sill. At the end of the second week, as she sat emptying the register, he came to stop beside her and peered at the ledger. "Have you make six orchids worth yet?" he asked.

And she had to say, "yes."

* * *

Days passed slowly in the flower shop, but when there was something to do Naruto didn't mind. Ino talked more and he found himself upset when customers entered and interrupted a story.

He noticed that she mumbled aloud to the portraits when she forgot he was there. Each morning she took them down from their positions over the door to clean the glass covers and wipe the dark wooden frames. Shikamaru stared down with a wrinkle in his brow that, when Naruto sat watching Ino and remembering the black words he'd said to her, seemed to express his disapproval. When she tapped at the scar beside her mouth, he remembered with embarrassment that, in his darker days, he'd thought her ugly, and he was glad he'd never said so out loud. When they ate lunch out and children asked loudly what was wrong with her, or when customers whispered in the corner, he winced.

But Ino moved through her day as if she didn't notice the children staring, or the way women's eyes roamed elsewhere while speaking to her, as if to even look at her would cause too much embarrassment. Each time she gracefully handled a rude question or conspicuous stare, he felt a kind of envy of her self-possession, some sort of pride in her, and at those times the wrinkle between Shikamaru's eyes seemed to echo his own sentiments.

Late in the week, in early morning, Ino stood rehanging the portraits and seeing Shikamaru's face Naruto felt a faint tremble in his heart, a sudden breathlessness, as he realized that despite the many faces he'd known and the friendships recently mended, there was no one to him as Ino was to Shikamaru; so dedicated in life and death. His surgery was in a matter of days. Suppose he died? Would there be anyone bothered enough to hang a portrait; any one who would draw comfort from his image?

"I want to have a party," he said suddenly. He straightened in his chair and Ino looked over her shoulder at him.

"What?"

"I want to see everyone together before next week. Before the surgery."

Ino stepped down from the ladder and closed it noisily before turning to him. "That's only five days away. It would be short notice." She paused. "People might not be able to come. Next weekend is the spring festival; everyone will be working this weekend to make time for it. Maybe you should wait until after." Her hand came up to touch at the scar beside her mouth.

"What if I die?" he asked quickly. "Don't you think everyone should come and see me before then? A good party, a party at a bar, and I'll get happy drunk, so that if I die the memory people have of me is me singing bawdy songs and laughing like an idiot, instead of..." He stopped and Ino wrinkled her brow at him, the stepladder held in one hand. "Well," he finished. "I mean, one last hurrah just in case."

Ino disappeared, bending, behind the counter. "I doubt you'll die, Naruto. Why not wait until people can actually come?"

"No," he said, and looked away from the portraits; outside it was beginning to rain. "I'd rather have it tomorrow."

* * *

Ino shifted in her seat uncomfortably. Something about his insistence on a party had filled her with dread, and she wondered, did he have some premonition? Did she believe in premonitions? as she stared at her plate. Worry sat like a stone in her stomach. Naruto chewed noisily across from her, glancing at the phone.

"You were right," he said. "No one has called yet." He swallowed and reached for his glass. "Whatever. I can have a nice enough time with the bartender."

Ino put down her fork and dropped her hands into her lap. "So Tsunade told you this surgery is dangerous?"

"No," he shrugged. "I just figured if I added the death thing it would seem more urgent." He smiled suddenly. "Why? Are you worried?"

Ino rolled her eyes toward the phone. "Me?" She crossed her arms over her stomach. "No. It's not my surgery."

* * *

Once he'd reserved an entire restaurant for the night, but that was back when he had money gushing out of his pockets, and friends knocking at his door every hour of the day, and Naruto realized that this would be perhaps a more reserved affair, even if he hoped otherwise. The bar was small; they didn't serve food; they'd give alcohol free but only the cheap kind. It was a busy weekend, and short notice. The phone hadn't rung once the night before.

If no one came, he could count on Ino's company, at least. She sat at the bar staring into her water and drumming her fingers against her cheek. "Aren't you going to drink something?" he asked, and tilted his bottle toward her.

"Who would drag you home if I did?" She pulled her glass closer to herself and sat with both hands around it.

Naruto shrugged. "I could sleep here for the night. I've done it before. My shoes got stolen, though." He laughed. "But that actually wouldn't matter right now."

Ino tilted her head. "You know, you shouldn't talk about yourself like that." She leaned against her folded arm. "I guess it's good that you can make jokes about yourself, but..."

"Yeah?" Naruto glanced at her hand, tracing absent patterns through the water ring left by her glass. "So I shouldn't tell cripple jokes. Noted."

"You'd probably make Hinata upset, at least." She lifted her eyes to the clock and he followed her gaze, bottle against his lips.

"I doubt any one is coming," he sighed, and stretched his free arm behind his head. "You were probably right. We can have fun, though." He glanced at her glass of water. "Or I can have fun and you can sit there."

"Why don't you have another bottle of fun and stop peer pressuring me? Are you 12?" Ino spoke to the counter, shaking her head.

Naruto laughed. "Maybe you could intoxicate me with conversation," he shrugged. "Then I wouldn't have to drink so much."

She smiled slightly and glanced again at the clock, tapping at the scar beside her lip. In this semi-darkness it was difficult to notice, but he saw her face so often.

"Do they bother you?" he asked suddenly. "The scars?"

She shrugged, sighed, and watched the second hand ticking. "I don't really care anymore. There are more important things." She twisted her glass against the counter and the ice clinked faintly against its sides. "So you're already drunk, huh? Asking a question like that."

"No," Naruto answered quickly. "It's just, isn't it painful to remember how it happened?" He drummed his fingers on his bottle once, and fiddled with the paper label. In the silence after his question he stopped and glanced over at her. "Don't you remember it every time you see yourself?"

Ino tilted her face and pulled her hair back in a hand. "So look at me," she said. "When you see me, do you remember?"

Honestly, he didn't. He blinked, looked away. "I wasn't really there," he said. The back of his neck was hot and he touched his cooler fingers to it. "I didn't mean to bring anything up."

Ino took in her breath and shrugged her shoulders. "You'll forget Sakura," she said, and dropped her bangs back into her face. "Or, I shouldn't say that. I mean, you'll forget the pain she caused you. Maybe you'll never love her again, but you'll forget that you hate her." She focused her eyes on her glass. "More often than not, I don't even notice that I don't look like I used to. I don't remember the harder parts of my life. It'll be like that for you, at some point. It will be like it happened to someone else."

Naruto shifted in his chair, stared at the web of froth clinging to the inside of the bottle on the counter. "You think?"

Ino lifted her hand as if to brush away his doubt. "You'll forget how much you hurt." She suddenly tilted her face back into view and smiled. "Your beer might help, too."

His mouth automatically widened in response. "Yeah," he sighed, and glanced at the clock. "I'll drink away my loneliness."

* * *

He might have stopped at a safe place if he'd been drinking alone. Unfortunately people showed up. If Lee hadn't started breaking things and Naruto hadn't fallen onto his face, the alcohol may have flowed indefinitely. At the sight of blood, though, the more sober of the group decided it was time to call it a night. Neji pulled Lee from his place on top of the counter and Kiba helped Naruto back into his chair, and the bartender saw to it that everyone left, and that he had Ino's name and address firmly in hand.

Naruto sang all of the way home, and for once Ino was glad she didn't live in the city. She imagined every window lighting up as they made their way home, people screaming from the open doors for them to "PLEASE SHUT UP" and Naruto, singing bawdy songs all the way. Once he'd almost fallen forward out of his chair and now she held his collar in one hand to keep him from any further incident. He laughed when she cursed in the darkness of the porch, unable to fit her key into the lock.

"You're drunk!" he gasped, snickering.

"Will you shut up already?" she snapped. The key turned in the lock and she glanced back at him. "If you're going to throw up, do it while we're still outside."

"I," he said, suddenly serious, "am very good at holding my liquor." He paused, sputtered, and laughed.

Ino rolled her eyes, pushed the door open, and shoved him inside. He complained when she turned on the lights, and complained some more when she pressed a wet washrag into his hand and told him to clean himself up.

"Get off me," he said, and threw the rag. "I just wanna sleep." He leaned dangerously forward, then flopped back against his backrest, eyes closed.

"If you bleed all over my sheets I swear to god..." She picked up the towel beside him and wiped quickly at the blood crusted above his lip. "At least it isn't broken. If I had to take you to the hospital like this--." He flinched and she pulled the rag from his face, resting her hand on her knee. She sighed. "Does it still hurt?"

"The only real pain... is the pain... in my heart..." Naruto sang, suddenly opening his eyes. "Oh, when I was _yooounng_, I walked without _know_ing where it was I was _go_ing... If I look over my _shoulderrrr_ I can _see_ her stiiill..."

Ino turned her face from him. It was her fault, after all, that he smelled like he did. She'd neglected her duties as baby sitter. The clock flashed numbers at her. "It is too late for this," she mumbled. "Alright, just take off your shirt. It's already getting all brown." She straightened and pulled the covers of his bed back. Naruto slowly obeyed but only managed to pull the shirt halfway over his head before he apparently forgot what he was doing. He blinked when she yanked the shirt free of him. "Can you wipe yourself off, drunk?" she asked, holding the rag out to him.

"I don't get drunk," he mumbled. "I... get _even."_

Ino took a few swipes at his neck and chest with the rag as he spoke but he smacked her hand away. "Fine," she snapped. "Whatever, I'm going to have to wash everything anyway. Where do you keep your sleep shirts?" She turned away toward his suitcase. "The sooner you go to bed the better."

"'Let's go to bed', I said, 'I'll go to bed', she said..." His voice wavered behind her.

Ino pulled a shirt free from the wad of clothing in his suitcase. "Where are you learning these songs?"

"I knew a pervert once," he whispered, as if he were beginning a ghost story. He laughed suddenly, shaking as Ino attempted to pull a shirt over his head.

"Oh my god," she mumbled, and bent to pull at his socks. "Just try to sleep and not puke all over yourself, OK?" She took his arm at one elbow, leaning over him. His eyes crossed as they tried to focus on her, then dropped to the hand on his elbow, the hand resting on the armrest of his chair. He grasped her wrist in his fingers as if to pull her off.

"Ino," he said suddenly, blinking, and then he sat, grasping her arm and saying nothing. His eyes shifted over her face, and Ino stood, waiting, feeling the pulse of her wrist under his thumb.

The clock on the wall beeped at the hour. Ino blinked and twisted her arm from his fingers.

"You really need to get to sleep," she whispered. He brought his empty hand up over his eyes and rubbed at them, and said nothing. He was silent as she helped him from the chair, quiet when she threw the blanket over him. He held his arm over his eyes and breathed deeply.

She watched him until she was sure he slept.

* * *


	11. Chapter 10

The thing was, he wasn't going to go. That was the reason he was late. He stared at the suit in the closet and realized he hated to put it on again; it was a thing for funerals, and he didn't want to wear it to say goodbye to Shikamaru, no matter that people said he was already gone, good as dead. He expected to be one of a crowd, but he opened the door onto a silent room of only two people, and seeing Ino standing there alone he realized what a coward he might have been, had he decided saying goodbye was too painful.

So he'd held her when her body gave out in shock as they pulled the sheets over Shikamaru's head; so he'd carried her home, once or twice, on those nights when she took to the bars to forget; so he'd helped her to the hospital when her arms had grown child-like and her legs failed to hold her anymore. She was stronger than him, despite it all. If he could have some of that strength... Maybe he'd held onto her hand too long, too tightly the night before, but he was drunk and try as he might he couldn't form a sentence from the words swimming in his head: you're stronger, thank you, you're beautiful.

These were the thoughts he was trying to hold onto in that early morning, but they drifted in and out of his head, and were tenuous, and he found himself staring at her over the table as he struggled to put them into order. He thought about what she'd said when she'd exposed her scars in the blue light of the bar; about Sakura and whether he could ever forget what she'd done. But then Ino turned a page and the sound cleared his mind again. She sat slumped at the table over a cup of coffee and a book, with uncombed hair, and he stared at the scar behind her mouth, and wondered how she could touch at it so absently.

If he was stuck as he was forever – if the surgeries didn't work - would he be able to live as if how he was, paralyzed, was normal and natural, the way she lived as if she'd had a scarred face all of her life? He stared at her downcast eyes and she was beautiful. If she could be like that, after all she'd been through, maybe there was hope fore him.

"Your surgery is in two days," she mumbled suddenly, looking up, and Naruto turned his eyes to the table.

"Yeah, probably won't get any sleep tonight. I'm already feeling anxious." He rubbed at his arm and laughed. "You know?" Her gaze was fixed on him when he lifted his own.

"I'll pray for you," she said distantly. For a moment her brow wrinkled. Was it the light in the window that made her eyes like glass? She blinked, focused, and then suddenly shrugged slightly. "You've become a nice breakfast companion, surprisingly." She suddenly looked away and lifted her coffee.

Naruto smiled. "Yeah, it's been nice." He pressed his hand to the back of his neck, and laughing seemed easy. "Pray for me," he said. "I'd hate to die and break up our breakfast club."

She swallowed her coffee loudly.

* * *

She wasn't sure exactly when it was, but at some point her mind started turning more consistently on his surgery. The numbers in her cash log were wrong, even though she'd redone them twice before. Naruto talked quietly with the elderly woman who'd stopped in for sunflowers and she wished him good luck, and quick healing. Ino tapped at the counter with her pen. The anxious feeling, she told herself, isn't any different. The thought of hospitals, seeing patients, had always made her nervous. That was a lie. Ino wrinkled her brow. Unless 'always' meant 'after Shikamaru', it was a lie. She pressed a hand to her stomach as it fluttered. That was it. Someone she cared about, lying in a hospital bed – that was the thought that troubled her.

The sudden laughter that rang out in the store broke her from her thoughts before they'd fully settled in her head. She glanced down at the log on the counter.

6 and 7 was 13, not 14.

* * *

Tsunade scanned the tense faces of the doctors in the room; they tried to hide their confusion, their distaste, by shuffling papers. The youngest in the room coughed into her closed fist and dropped her eyes to her lap. The oldest sniffed, adjusted his glasses, and sniffed again.

Sakura stood before them and bowed low again. "Thank you for keeping me in your favour," she said stiffly to her feet. There was no movement in the room. Tsunade pursed her lips and abruptly stood from her chair.

"Sakura is joining our team," she said. There was a sudden hushed whisper at the other end of the table, and she lifted her chin. "She'll be the main surgeon in the upcoming operation."

The man in front of her leaned forward in his chair, suggested another doctor, and the set of his shoulders said: a doctor with better standing; a doctor without a rumor smeared to their name. "I was under the impression, too," he said, and cleared his throat, "taking into account what she did to him, that she was forbidden to work with the patient Uzumaki. Shouldn't we respect the patient's wish that she not be around him?"

Amidst the murmurs of assent, Sakura's pale face went red.

"The information we've been looking over the past week is all Sakura's," Tsunade answered. "Of course she should have a place on the surgical team. She has excellent chakra control, much more so than most of you; she's a valuable asset, no matter her current situation."

Sakura shifted her feet.

The slight woman at the end of the table lifted her hand. "I wonder if she has too much emotional investment in this patient," she said carefully. "I wonder if it might impair her ability to perform as well as we know she can." And the older doctor touched at his glasses, comments on her integrity and level-headedness; she might be dangerous in the operation room, being so emotional, so close. "She's too involved with the patient," he said, "and it's a liability."

"I think that's an asset," Sakura said suddenly. The shuffling in the room stopped. Someone stuttered as if to begin speaking but she raised her eyes and the room was silent again. "I won't fail. I'm driven by nothing but the desire to correct what I've done. If you aren't comfortable with me, I won't take offense if you drop out of the team." She pulled a chair from beneath the table and took in her breath and sat.

"We have two days left to prepare," she said, and opened the file that laid on the table.

* * *

He asked her if they were eating when she paused in the doorway. "What?" she asked, and he clarified: "Dinner."

"Dinner?" She folded her arms over her stomach and turned her eyes toward her shoulder, shrugging. "I hadn't thought about it. I wasn't hungry today." Her fingers looked nervous against her arm. "I don't know, I'm not in a good mood. If I cook nothing will taste good." Her eyes lifted. "But you should eat." She paused, shifted, and slipped out of his doorway.

Naruto pushed himself onto his elbows and stared after her until the sound of cabinets and pots rang down the corridor. "What's wrong?" he mumbled, but he couldn't make himself raise his voice over the sounds in the kitchen.

Dinner was tasteless and he laughed slightly as he shook salt over the meal. "This might be one of the last meals I ever have," he joked. Laughing at things always made them seem small. If he laughed enough the surgery tomorrow morning would break down, become manageable, fit into his head. "My last dinner, and you couldn't make it a good one?"

Ino's jaw stopped moving and she covered her mouth with a napkin. "Maybe I'm getting sick," she muttered. "I can't taste anything." She stood and turned from him and her full plate clattered into the sink.

Naruto stared at the low set of her shoulders and turned his fork in his hand. The uneasiness he'd felt throughout the day suddenly was more tangible, and he wondered if it was rubbing off on her, despite the smiling he did. "Maybe you should rest," he said.

"I've tried," she mumbled. She turned on the water and then just as quickly turned it off. "What time do you have to be at the hospital tomorrow?"

"Five." Her shoulders rose as he spoke.

"What time do you get out?" she asked. She cleared her throat. "Of surgery, I mean."

"They said to expect no less than 12 hours. And then I'll be out for an hour or two after, too." He turned his fork again in his hand. "They make it sound important," he said loudly, "but I'm not worried." He opened his mouth to say, 'you shouldn't be worried, either', but Ino's profile was suddenly visible to him. She smiled slightly.

"I'll be there when you wake up," she said. Her image seemed to remain even after she turned back to the dishes. Naruto turned his eyes to his hands.

"No, that's OK." He rubbed at the upturned corner of his mouth. "If you're sick, you should take it easy."

She shrugged and turned the water on again. "I might get worried about you," he thought he heard her say, but the faucet was loud and the dishes were louder, and he might have misheard. In the morning Tsunade came to collect him.

Ino must have slept oblivious in her room; she didn't come out to say goodbye.

* * *

You can come in, Tsunade told her, he's drifting off now. Seeing him lie there, struggling to keep his eyes open (just relax and sleep, Naruto, Tsunade told him), the responsibility that rested atop her was more real than it had been on those nights that she'd stayed up reading, writing notes and drawing diagrams, staring at models and working until her fingertips burned on faceless bodies. He seemed too vulnerable.

His blue eyes roved over her face more than once before they closed, and they were the eyes she'd seen on younger nights, in younger times: he stared at her and there was no anger in his face.

If she could have him again like that, as he was, she would work until her hands burned away, until the details blurred and her eyes went blind, until her heart bled out the last of its energy and she collapsed, empty, on the hospital floor.

Are you ready, Tsunade asked her, and she answered yes.

* * *

Naruto stared with eyes half lidded at the faces above him. He couldn't really hear what they were saying. There was this whooshing in his ears, this dimness to his eyes.

He'd forgotten how nice it was to slip into sleep like this, with this mask over your face. Rooms became warmer. Memories became pliable. Was that face above him Tsunade's? Somehow it was beginning to look like Sakura's. She hovered over him as the world became more and more grey, and less and less colour, until it was fuzzy and black and he dreamt vague things he knew he wouldn't remember.

* * *

Things will be better soon.

Kakashi had told her that once, and she believed him. Of course, it wasn't the same. It was hardly hours later that Sasuke left for the first time. But he came back, and Sakura felt it was proof that this was how things were supposed to be – all of them together, the way it was at the beginning. Why did she believe in that, still, when he'd left again? Why did she strive for that normality, that past perfection that had existed only in her mind?

Was it just her, or did everyone's life lose clarity as they aged? She'd grown too good with illusions, to good at deluding herself. Things were hazy.

Tsunade was saying something to her but the meaning of her words were lost. Naruto's brows twitched. There was suddenly a fly in the room. Had it been there the whole time? Sakura shut her eyes for the briefest second. This is important, she told herself. Why don't you focus? In the beginning she'd worked as if she would never tire, spurred by the peacefulness in his face, but how she wanted desperately to look at the clock. How long had they been doing this? How far had they progressed? There was a burning that was beginning to spread up from her finger tips. She asked, am I any closer to being finished? I want to stop.

She could never stay with one thing for as long as was needed. That was her problem. Naruto's face was still when she glanced at it. Am I helping? she wondered. She told herself, you're doing well, just finish up, it's working, but if it wasn't, she wouldn't know. She was just that great at deluding herself.

* * *

The hospital was a foreboding place again, and it pushed in on all sides of Ino as she walked through the hall, shoulders narrow, flowers and vase gripped between her hands. This is the same breathlessness, she thought. Somewhere along the way she'd stopped thinking of hospitals as places of healing. Too many people had died.

But don't think of that, she told herself.

Sakura sat looking exhausted and with hands that trembled slightly around the pen she held. Her skin took on the strange colour of the overhead lights and she didn't nod, as Tsunade did, to Ino as she entered the room. Naruto laid quietly under the blanket. Was it the light that shadowed him in such strange ways?

The blinds were closed against the darkness outside but Ino wanted to open them. The room smelled too clean, and the flowers looked wilted in the artificial light.

* * *

Sakura's eyes jumped from bruise to bruise up Naruto's dotted arms. Tsunade stood beside him, a hand on his forehead. The IV that had run from the back of his hand was gone; now there was only a bandage there, and he would be waking soon.

"How long will it be?"

The voice surprised her; it was Ino, leaning on the wall beside the door, her arms crossed over her stomach; Ino, whom Sakura who had forgotten about. She wondered again what she was doing here. She'd brought flowers, put them on the bedside table, and never left.

"Not much longer," Tsunade answered, without looking up. She took her had from Naruto's forehead and pulled the sheet over his chest away; it was mottled with purple. Sakura took in her breath slowly through her nose, and marked a note in the book she held, stifling a yawn. She'd expected the bruising, but it looked worse than what she'd imagined. Ino cleared her throat loudly and Sakura saw her tighten her arms, turn her eyes to the reflection of the lights in the floor. She shifted her head.

"Ino, are you OK?" she asked, and she received only a nod in return.

Ino stared at the flowers in the vase on the table and tried to see every detail. A wilting leaf distorted by glass and water. Petals shifting in a current of air too weak to feel on her skin. Her eyes drifted to Tsunade's ringed fingers, the purple of her nails, a bruise. Naruto's throat suddenly moved and Ino's eyes closed, shifted, opened on the safer image of the vase.

"He won't wake," Tsunade said quietly.

"What?" Her voice was too loud in the room. Naruto's head moved slowly on the pillow. Tsunade looked away from him, brow wrinkled.

"He's going to wake soon," she said, and Ino wondered how she could have misheard.

Sakura lifted her chin toward Ino, who blinked and looked away. Her fingers came up to press against her the scar beside her lip. The outburst seemed like it couldn't have belonged to her. "Ino," she said. "Maybe you shouldn't be here."

"I just misheard," she answered. Her hand dropped from her mouth and her arms tightened around her stomach. Her eyes darted from her feet to the window to Naruto. When he shifted, groaned, her mouth tightened into a sad line. Sakura swallowed. She'd felt tired, heavy, but suddenly felt more awake, wary. What was that feeling?

"You don't look well," she said quickly to the blond.

Ino wrinkled her brow and focused for a brief moment on Sakura's face. Her eyes burned green even as her face – and everything in the room – fell away in grey. There was a look in them that Ino couldn't quite discern. She suddenly felt more breathless. Naruto's eyes cracked open.

"Maybe you should leave." Sakura's hand on her elbow.

His mouth opened, closed, and opened again. Sakura pulled at her arm but somehow Ino found herself stepping forward. "What's wrong with him?" She swallowed and tried to speak again – her voice was too high, too tight. "What's wrong with him?"

"Just lie still." Tsunade's voice was nearly lost in the background. "Naruto, don't move."

He closed his eyes and a wrinkle grew between his brows.

"What's wrong with him?" she said again. Why was Tsunade so quiet? Why was Sakura so intent on getting her out of the room? Naruto's eyes opened and flickered right, left, to her. He breathed slowly, but noisily. Sakura's hand was tight on her elbow; she could feel her pulse sound in the hollow of her arm.

"He'll be OK, Ino." Tsunade turned to press a reassuring hand to Ino's hip and behind her Naruto's mouth widened into an uneasy smile.

"I'm all good," he said. His voice was not his own; it creaked through his throat. He lifted his head from the pillow as if to sit up.

Tsunade's hand fell from Ino's hip. "Don't move," she started to say, turning. Her voice was lost in Naruto's screaming.

Sakura's hand was gone from her arm.

* * *

Why did she stay alone? Ino sat beside him and his hand was foreign in her own. So everyone was right, then, weren't they? He wasn't himself anymore. He wasn't Shikamaru. She cried noiselessly out of habit, even though she was beginning to believe he couldn't hear her after all. The machine breathed loudly in the room; his chest rose and fell with mechanical regularity. His forehead was dry underneath her fingers.

She pressed her palm to his and his fingers opened with difficulty, stiff. Ino swallowed. "It would be stupid to say I don't want you to go," she mumbled. "You're already gone, though, aren't you?"

His slack mouth was still.

The light was bright in the window, but his skin was dull, didn't shine beneath it. Over the year it had become thinner and thinner, more like paper than skin. Open spots appeared on his heels, his shoulder blades, leaking pinkish liquid more and more often. Ino leaned over him, stared at the flatness of his brow, the grey shadow of his lashes. 'You don't want to remember him like this,' they'd told her. 'He isn't Shikamaru anymore.' They'd said goodbye without touching him, couldn't rest their eyes on his form for more than a few seconds, and filed quietly through the room as if already at a funeral.

"I still love you, OK?" she said to him. His chest shuddered and rose with mechanic breath. "And I'm sorry." For keeping him so long, for letting him go too soon; she wasn't sure which. His cheek was suddenly wet and she pressed a shaking hand to his face to wipe the tear away before she brushed her fingers beneath her leaking eyes. "It isn't goodbye," she said, straightening, and she was speaking more for herself than for him, now.

The door opened suddenly, loudly; the tall figure that entered, suited, paused panting in the doorway. "I'm late," he said. "I'm sorry."

Ino looked away from him. "Naruto. I haven't done it yet." As if the beeping, the breathing of the machine didn't make that obvious. The tears wouldn't stop pouring from her eyes. She pressed them closed and the sound of the machine, heavily breathing, was almost inaudible.

"Should I stay?"

The words penetrated her mind only slowly. Her eyes opened as Naruto touched his hand to her elbow.

"Ino," he said, and his brow wrinkled. He looked too tall, too awkward in his suit. "Do you want me to stay?"

Several people had asked her. 'No,' she'd answered. But once the room was empty she regretted allowing them to leave her alone, regretted fighting against the administration for the responsibility she now had. "Please," she managed.

He swallowed. "Can you do it?" His hand, still at her elbow, tightened slightly. "If you can't... If you don't want to..."

"I can do it," she said.

So she leaned over him for the final time, and pushed his hair back from his forehead. She straightened the sheet over his chest. Her hands didn't begin to tremble until they came to rest on the switch of the machine at his bedside. He's too weak to breathe on his own anymore, they said. He'll go quietly, they said. He'll look peaceful, he's sedated.

In the seconds after she pulled the mask and tube from his mouth, the moment that she smoothed the hair above his brow again, the beeping of the heart monitor stuttered. She pressed her hand to her mouth and Naruto moved in her periphery. "No, I'm fine," she said quickly. "I'm fine." She reached out to quiet the monitor; it didn't matter that his heart beat, anyway, they said. His brain has had such little activity in the past month, in the past _year. _It's time to give up. It's time to let go.

All it is is meat now, a nurse had said. It's a body and nothing else. And for a brief moment Ino allowed herself to believe so.

But he gasped in the now complete silence. Once. Twice. His shoulders were thin and child-like, suddenly beneath her fingers. She clutched at them as his chest curved toward her, struggling beneath its sheet. Was she screaming? She grasped at his face as his chest desperately fluttered. He wanted to live. He was there, struggling to breathe, and she'd given up on him. She heard him gasping even as they pulled the sheet over his face and took him out of her arms.

Naruto's hands were hot over hers.

* * *

"It's like never-ending pins and needles." Naruto fisted and opened his hand and Tsunade took it in her own.

"It isn't any better? We put you back to sleep for 30 minutes more." She studied the drip at his side for a moment before turning her eyes back to him.

"It's bearable now." He set his teeth and blinked slowly at the ceiling. The skin round his eyes was creased with weariness. "I felt like I was on fire before, though."

"You haven't had any chakra flow in so long, it will take your body a while to get used to it. Yours is so powerful, too..." Tsunade patted his arm and smiled. Already he seemed healthier, had more colour in his face. "But this means good things for your recovery."

Naruto swallowed and suddenly lifted his head from the pillow. "Where's Ino?"

"Sakura helped her home," she answered. His hand stiffened briefly in hers.

"Helped her home?" He slid his arm back, attempted to sit up, but stopped on his own, wincing, before Tsunade opened her mouth to warn him against it. "She's been looking sick the last couple days. What's wrong with her?"

Tsunade knew the expression that she'd seen frozen upon Ino's face in the split second before she collapsed. It was familiar; that same expression, that same collapsing that had finally cost her the hospital job she'd worked so hard in years earlier to get. "She doesn't do well in situations like these," she said carefully. "Hospitals are sometimes difficult for her. Maybe you somehow reminded her of Shikamaru."

Naruto's brows, pulled together over his blue eyes, lifted slightly. "You said Sakura is with her."

"She'll stay with her until everything calms down," she assured him. "Sakura is her closest friend." She watched his the downward turn of the corner of his mouth. His eyes dropped away from hers and scanned the foot of his bed. There was something in the set of his jaw that was she couldn't read. Was he in more pain than he let on? Tsunade bit at her lip, then pulled her hand off his. "About Sakura," she said. Even her voice was too abrupt. "You need to let her help you."

Naruto's mouth broadened and Tsunade saw the 'No' begin to form on his lips.

"She's already helped you," she said firmly. His eyes were electric on hers as she spoke. "And you need her if you really want to walk again." It was a truth that needed to be said aloud. "You can't do it without her."

He looked away, and his head lifted at the flowers. He stared at them a moment, thinking; Tsunade stared at the back of his head unwaveringly, as if to hear his thoughts. "No," he said. "I've come this far without her help. I don't need her. Not her."

"You didn't, though." Tsunade exhaled and his head turned incrementally toward her. Her eyes followed the lines of his profile. "You didn't do it without her."

* * *

A/N: I was happy to hear that some of you are liking the remade version of this story. I'm sorry I haven't replied to comments yet, but will do so soon. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy this short chapter.


	12. Chapter 11

Ino stared at the coffee cup in front of her but it didn't seem any more real. The tea within it was cold and still and the cup's whiteness seemed excessive; it looked a paper cut out and she was surprised that her hands could cup it, that it had depth and shape. Sakura pushed a plate of thin sandwiches toward her with her fingertips, then pulled her hand away, back to her lap, where she rubbed at a fingernail in silence. Ino turned the cup once more in her hands before she lifted it to her mouth, but it was too strong and bitter, and only left her thirsty still. She hadn't realized how thirsty she was.

"A flashback?" Sakura asked. She leaned forward and her elbows slid onto the tabletop. "Did you think you were in his room again?"

Ino shrugged slightly. She swallowed again but the bitter taste remained in her mouth.

"You shouldn't have come." Sakura put her chin in her palm and looked away. "I don't know why you came."

"I didn't think it would be like that," Ino answered. The sound of her chair on the floor as she shifted was loud and she went still again. "I didn't know waking up would be like..."

"Well." Sakura took her breath in through her nose and her eyes flickered over the wallpaper beside her shoulder. "I didn't know either. If he'd have stayed still his chakra wouldn't have surged like it did." Her arms folded themselves on the table. "If I knew it would be like that I would have told you not to come." She rubbed at her thumbnail. "But I didn't know you were coming."

Ino rested her chin on her knee and pressed her fingers to the scar hidden beneath her hair above her ear. "Can we not talk about it?" she said quietly. "Please?"

Sakura leaned back in her chair. "Sorry."

The scar was less raised than she remembered. Maybe it was disappearing. She traced its edge with a fingertip and then smoothed her hair tightly over it. "Thanks for staying with me," she offered into the silence, lifting her head. Sakura's hand rested heavily on the table and she put her own over it. "I haven't seen you around in a while."

"Yeah, well." Her green eyes stayed fixed on the wallpaper. "I don't like socializing very much these days." Her hand was still and cool beneath Ino's. "It's been really hard, you know," she said suddenly. "I hate going out. I hate the way people look at me." She took in her breath. "I hate having no one to talk to."

Ino wrapped her arms around her knees. "I'm here." Across from her Sakura shifted in her chair and folded her arms, and said nothing. Ino wrinkled her brow at the watermarked table in front of her. "I'm here whenever you need to talk, Sakura."

She shrugged slightly, then turned in her chair and rested her elbows on the table. "Kakashi saw me yesterday. I know he did. But he doesn't say anything to me anymore." Her mouth suddenly tightened and she hid her eyes beneath a hand. "I don't know how I messed things up so badly," she sputtered. "I don't know how I could do this." She covered her face in her arms.

Ino bit at her lip. Naruto, even if he was in pain right now, was one step closer to walking again, maybe. "You're fixing things, though," she said. "You're trying hard to fix things, I know."

"That's not enough, though, is it?" Sakura pushed her hair from her face and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.

"Nobody can ever do enough, Sakura." Her arms were cold – Ino pressed her hands to them but her fingers seemed chilled too. "All you can do is what you can."

* * *

Naruto had turned his eyes to his hands and then closed them. "I don't care," he said. "I don't care what she's done for me. I don't want to talk to her, and I don't want to see her. I don't want anything to do with her."

"If you want to walk again--." Tsunade started, but he only said again, as he'd said before, "no".

"I don't need anything from her," he said, and opened his eyes. "I'll do it on my own. I don't want to think about her anymore. She doesn't exist."

"Naruto--."

"Please, Tsunade." His eyes were tired. "Don't talk to me about her anymore. My answer is always going to be no."

Tsunade pressed her hand to his shoulder. "You know she's trying." He only shrugged slightly.

"She wouldn't have to fix anything if she didn't break it in the first place," he said quietly. His lips tightened. "Do you want me to feel sorry for her? Did you think I'd be happy you went behind my back and got her to do this?"

"No." She paused and then pulled the sheet further over his torso. "I just want you to have the best chance that you can. And whether you like it or not, having Sakura ups your chances of walking again." The chair squeaked back over the tile as she stood. "And she wants to help you. I didn't get her to do anything."

Naruto propped himself on an elbow, wincing. "You're leaving already?"

"You need rest anyway. You should sleep." Tsunade stood in the doorway with her hand on the knob. "We'll talk about his another day," she said firmly. Naruto turned his eyes to his knees and relaxed against the bed.

"I'll still say no," he said, as she closed the door. Then, "Hey." The door widened and Tsunade's expressionless face was visible again. "Can you check in at Ino's?" His brow wrinkled."If she's still sick..."

Tsunade paused in the doorway. "Sure," she said quietly. "Sleep, will you?"

"Yeah," he said. He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. "I will."

* * *

It was strange to have so little to write in his book before she went to sleep. Besides what he ate for breakfast, and the fact that his surgery was a success, the page was empty. Ino's pen traced circles in the margin and the clock ticked loudly in the room. _I'm worried_, she wrote. _I don't want to fall asleep._

When she did she dreamt of his face, and how peaceful it looked when she found him - the same kind of face she'd turned to, waking at night, when he slept to her left – and how it had contorted in its final moments into something she'd never seen before. 'It's hopeless', the medic had said, and she'd protested, bit and kicked and scratched mindlessly until Kakashi, soft-eyed, pulled her away. And what if she'd agreed? What if she'd said, "Chouji's gone, and Shikamaru, too' instead, and accepted it, and let him slip away like that, quietly, with dignity?

She wasn't thinking of what was best, then. She was only thinking of what might hurt less.

* * *

Their voices rose behind her, just out of earshot, but she didn't strain to hear the words anymore; she knew them all already. 'Unprofessional', 'unbelievable', and then other, worse things. What did it matter? The surgery was a success. She'd done it.

"It's favouritism, obviously," a voice said, its source hidden surreptitiously behind a chart. The nurses looked at her from beneath their lashes and talked in low voices.

"She's the Hokage's student, after all. Of course she'd lead the surgery."

"Since when does the favourite ever have to pay for their mistakes?"

"Crippling a man is more than a mistake, isn't it?"

The next day Naruto would be released. If she was lucky, he'd agree to let her back into his life, just enough to know his disability, enough to become intimate with it, enough to understand the injury well enough to perfectly reverse it.

"I feel bad for her. No one will even look at her anymore."

After the click of her office door Sakura breathed shallowly until the mumbled words passed by and faded into the silence. Her room seemed stuffy and unused, too bright in comparison with the library basement she'd spent so many months in. She'd thought it was too small when she was first assigned it, but standing in the quiet space she realized how lucky she was to have an office, a position, even if she'd forfeited her reputation.

"No one will even look at me anymore." She said the words out-loud because they were true, and she had the strange thought that saying them herself would make them less absolute, more easily twisted into something less painful. Two doctors had dropped out of the team – on principle, they said – and while the others listened carefully to her within meetings they left as a group to avoid being alone with her, and the stilted conversation that might arise in such a situation. They didn't greet her in the hallways, but at least they treated her with professional respect in the operating room. She could live on that alone, maybe; neutrality and distance. She would have to stop being so needy.

Sakura sat at her desk and pressed her hands against her knees. She had an office, at least, if everything else was gone. She stared down at her hands and wondered: had even Ino seemed more distant? What would she have, after Naruto? If she could make him walk again – and she would, she had to – where did things go from there? Fixing him wouldn't erase anything she'd said or done. And she was beginning to wonder if pushing him was the worst of it.

She'd called him hopeless and stupid, an idiot, talentless, second rate. She'd broken things in his house and slapped him more than once. How many times had she hit him? All of their arguments seemed to coalesce into one long and brutal one. It was easy enough to confuse them; they all had the same cause. And how was _he_ doing?

The sun shone brightly on one corner of her desk and Sakura rose to close the curtain over the single window into her office. She hadn't heard anything about Sasuke. Where had they moved him? Was he even still in the hospital? If she asked about him, would that be selfish? Maybe. She paused in the sun and it prickled at her arms. The thin inset where the window rested was covered in dust that came away on her fingers. He'd really loved her, once. Or so she chose to believe. He'd said so himself.

If he'd stayed away, if he'd let her forget him, maybe things would be different. Naruto was closer to her and Hinata was out of his eyes, and they liked being with each other; days seemed easy and she remembered smiling often; Sasuke's name didn't enter her mind every day and when it did it flitted out again. But the day he came back it was dark and rainy; his eyes caught at her; Naruto reached to take her hand but somehow it didn't feel right anymore; and when Sasuke was led away and out of sight he was all she thought of. It would be stupid to say she was taken with passion, because it scared her at first, how incessantly she thought of him, and how happy it made her to feel needed.

And when he left again it was because she lacked something, or he did. It was because she couldn't make him forget everything else as completely as she was able to. You're obsessed, she told him, but he opened the door anyway, stepped out. It won't make you happy, she said. And when it seemed he didn't care for himself, she added, I'll be miserable without you.

You have Naruto, he said, and you were happy with him, weren't you? His eyes weren't angry yet when he said, don't you see the way he looks at you? You loved him, didn't you?

Why did those words make her so upset? The feeling of being thrown out, cast away, passed around? What made her speak without thinking? I never loved him, not like I love you; he's nobody to me, she said. And you, if you leave like this you'll fail. You're chasing nothing, she said. But the words didn't sadden him, didn't make him drop his pack and turn back to the doorway. She grasped his arm: Don't go. Don't leave me.

You'd be lucky if that nobody would take you, he told her, and he was angry. He pulled her fingers from her arm. I don't want you, he said, and when she finally started crying he only said, you deserved me. He left and things were changed, uneasy, and bleak. If he'd never come back, she might never have become the person she was now.

But she couldn't blame him. Sakura turned her hands up and her fingertips were smudged with black. What, she wondered, is wrong with me?

* * *

In the late morning Ino smoked a single cigarette for as long as it would last and stared at the phone over the pages of a book she wasn't really reading. Would they call her to pick him up? Or was it stupid to think he'd be home that day? She walked aimlessly through the house because nervousness made her limbs jerky when she sat still. The sun in her bedroom was bright and she opened her windows to dispel the strange sense of doom that had hovered over her that night, and made sleep uneasy. She was happy to see the sun. Maybe she would take it as a good omen.

Naruto's journal still laid on the table beside her bed and she wrote in it after lounging beside it and thinking of nothing. _Not sure if he'll be home today. No news is good news. _She didn't want to stay home but wondered if she might miss something by being at work. And work was too close to the hospital, and the hospital had once again become the darker kind of place she remembered fearing years ago; visiting Naruto would be hard. Maybe there are some things people can never get over. Ino rubbed at the scar beside her eye. Of course there are things that people can never get over. Shikamaru, for her. Asuma, for Kurenai. Sasuke, for Sakura.

Sakura. Ino pushed her feet over the floor and into the sunlight, then back into the shadow. Outside it was beginning to get hot, maybe. Sakura. She hadn't been a good friend to Sakura. Maybe, when Naruto was better, she would invite her out for drinks. Or if being in public was as hard on her as she said, maybe they could stay in at her place, and talk over good food. Was she still living in the apartment she'd shared with Naruto? Or had she moved back into her own place? Ino realized she didn't know and that fact saddened her. Sakura had been at her side in the most difficult moments of her life, and she'd failed to return the favour.

It was the afternoon before she put on her shoes. In the sunlight the hospital wasn't the foreboding place she'd left the night before, but walking down the halls it was easy to imagine that Sakura had lied to her; that Naruto was still in pain; that the surgery hadn't worked after all, and all of her distant reassurances were meant to calm, not inform. When she opened the door she half expected the room to be empty, but Tsunade was there, tight-lipped, and Naruto, smiling.

"Ino!" he shouted. "Ino, get over here!" He'd lifted her shirt beneath his chin and pointed at the long incision beneath his belly button until Tsunade pulled his hand away. "This had stitches in it last night! And look at it!"

Tsunade released his hand. "Put your shirt down. Just because it looks almost healed doesn't mean you can go poking at it like an idiot."

"So that's it?" Ino's eyes flitted from Naruto to the Hokage. "Everything went well?"

"The surgery was a complete success. We'll spend several weeks observing how the chakra affects his spine and recovering for the next step, but we aren't going to take too much time." Tsunade's mouth twisted. "That's been wasted enough."

Naruto lifted his eyes to her. "I'm happy right now, Tsunade," he said. "That ups my chances too, doesn't it?" He smiled carefully. Tsunade frowned and looked toward the door.

"Go home," she said quietly. "You'll be more comfortable there." She turned her eyes to Ino and they seemed faraway. "Take care of him."

* * *

"You're awake."

His head shifted with each sound – the closing door, footsteps, the squeak of the chair as Kakashi sat – but he said nothing. His eyes opened briefly but stayed lidded, as if the light in the room was too bright.

"The surgery worked," Kakashi told him, and Sasuke exhaled sharply.

"He's an idiot," he mumbled. His words had grown more and more jumbled with each passing visit. His eyes fluttered closed and he swallowed slowly. "Why are you here, Kakashi?" he said, and inhaled. "Why the viz...viz..." He swallowed again. "Why the visit?"

Kakashi rested his elbows on his knees. "I come by every day. You're always sleeping."

The corner of Sasuke's mouth twitched upward and his eyes rolled open, toward the IV that hung at his side. "This is what they do to me," he said slowly. "The last Uchiha." His eyes flickered over Kakashi's face. "Why are you here, Kakashi?"

His room seemed unnaturally cold. Kakashi straightened, took a breath, and rubbed at the back of his neck. "Tsunade has released you," he said quietly. "They'll be asking you questions soon." Sasuke mouth twitched.

"So that means..." he started. His words ran together and Kakashi leaned forward to catch them, but there wasn't anything more.

"They'll transfer you before the day is out." He laced his fingers together, then pulled them apart and hung his hands over his knees. "They'll lower your dosage, too," he said.

"Only so they can ask me questions." Sasuke's lips tightened into a vague, brief smile. "Tell them I'll run. I will." His eyes closed. "I'll get out of wherever they put me," he slurred. Even in the cold his face was misted with sweat. He breathed heavily.

Kakashi tilted his head. "I doubt they'll keep you long," he said carefully. "If you tell them what they want to know about your time away. What organizations you joined, how you supported yourself. What you did."

"Nothing." Sasuke's voice was a heavy whisper. "I have...nothing to tell them." He swallowed and his eyes opened and skittered over the ceiling. "They can kill me now. We shouldn't keep everyone waiting."

"Sasuke, you won't be put to death. Sakura and Naruto worked hard to ensure that wouldn't happen, even after you left this last time." Kakashi sighed. "What are you trying to protect, if you won't talk? _Do_ you have alternative alliances? Because that's what they'll think, if you refuse to cooperate."

Sasuke's head moved slowly over the pillow. "I don't have anything," he said. He stared at the empty space at the foot of his bed, and something in the steadiness of his eyes kept Kakashi from saying anything more. He watched until the Uchiha's focused eyes lost clarity. His head lolled back on the pillow again. He slept.

* * *

"Man, I'm glad to be home." Naruto pushed his hands over his head and sat in the doorway for a moment. Ino pulled her shoes off and glanced back at him.

"Was Tsunade like that the whole time?" she asked carefully, frowning. "Tense like that?" She pushed her shoes to the wall with a foot. "It made me think something was wrong with you."

"Nah," he said, and paused for a moment with his lips parted. He suddenly smiled, first tightly and then without reserve. "Whatever, you know? I feel like eating outside today." He pushed past her and toward his room. "Can we have dinner outside today?"

"I'd have to clean off the porch but that's fine." Ino passed her hand over the hair on the back of her head. "Think about what you want to eat, then."

"I'll help, you know," he called.

Ino opened the curtains to the porch and stared out for a moment. "Are you OK?" she said after a moment. She listened to him, distant in his room, for a moment. "Everything feels OK?" she called, louder.

"I feel great," he shouted back. "Lighter, even."

"That's good," Ino sighed. She pulled open the door and pushed a few leaves from the porch with a bare foot. The broom laid against the side of the house, looking ragged. "So..." She turned back into the house. "So, when is your next surgery?"

Naruto came into the room. "What?"

"What did Tsunade say about the next surgery?"

He touched at the skin behind his ear and looked around the room. "I don't know. I don't want to talk about surgeries now, though." His eyes refocused on her. "You look tired."

"Nah," she said, and nothing else. The porch was warm under her feet and she swept lazily. "I think dirt's coming _out _of this thing," she mumbled, and shook the broom. It was old and had probably been buried in snow through the winter.

Naruto hovered in the living room. "I know it had something to do with Shikamaru," he said hesitantly. "What happened at the hospital. And I know that you were discharged as a medic, and that you probably don't want to..." He stared at the pile of leaves Ino had swept up even as she paused to look at him. "I mean, you're doing enough for me as it is, and... I don't want to ask you to do something that might be painful for you, but if you could... If you could help me get to where I need to be for the next surgery, I'd be really grateful." He looked up. "That's what she's pissed about. Tsunade. She wants Sakura to do this for me, but I can't." He pressed a hand to the back of his neck and laughed slightly. "I don't want to make you any more tired, though. I feel like I shouldn't ask you this, but Sakura... Her... I can't."

Ino stood for a moment regarding him. There was a wind but it was hot and hardly relieved the burn of the late sun's rays on the back of her neck. "That's fine," she said. "I can do that."

Naruto wrinkled a brow at her. "I don't want anything to be weird," he started.

"I can go through therapy exercises, no problem," she interrupted. "I want you to walk again as much as you want that. Worry about yourself, OK?" She picked up a foot and examined the dirt that had collected on it for brief moment before stepping back inside. "Worry about what you want to eat, for example."

Naruto laughed again, this time loudly, creasing the skin beside his eyes. "The sooner I walk the sooner you can kick me out of here." She smiled.

"Well," she said, high-browed, "that's only part of the reason."

* * *

It was nearly evening before Tsunade would see her, and now, as temperatures cooled and her yawning became more frequent, she was beginning to feel the effects of her part in Naruto's surgery. Her hands had been shaking all day and now they felt heavy in the fingertips, and tingled. It seemed like a chore to open the door into Tsunade's office. For a moment she thought she saw someone else there, standing, beside the desk, but her eyes had been blurrier as the day progressed, and when she blinked to clear them it was just Tsunade, sitting and tight-lipped.

"Sakura," she said. "Are you feeling OK today?"

"I don't feel anything I didn't expect," Sakura answered. She swallowed. "He won't let me work with him, will he?" she said. Tsunade blinked slowly and turned her eyes to the stacks of paper on her desk. "I can tell from your face." Sakura's hand fisted weakly. Her fingertips were hot on her palm. "I guess I knew he would."

"I sent him home today, early." Tsunade stood with a sharp sigh and suddenly began straightening the folders and documents on her desk. "I probably should have kept him, but..."

"Did you tell him?" Sakura asked loudly. "Did you tell him I'm the one that got his chakra working again? That getting that chakra flow reestablished in his legs would increase his chances of walking again by at least ten percent?"

"I talked to him for a good hour, Sakura," Tsunade snapped. "Do you want me to fault him for wanting nothing to do with you?" She pressed her hand to her hip, was suddenly taller and wider. Sakura's shoulders rose in response. "After what you did to him, Sakura, are you serious?"

"He isn't thinking about himself," Sakura answered quietly. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have raised my voice; but you know that he's hurting himself by doing this." There was a tear on her face and she wiped it away with her aching fingers. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be crying" she mumbled. "I'm just over-tired. And..." She wiped her face again, this time more roughly. "The fact that he's hurting himself is what upsets me more than knowing he hates me, and wants to hurt me."

Tsunade released her breath; her back bent and she pressed one hand against the desk and the other to her forehead. "Honestly, I don't even know how to deal with this. Your entire team."

"He has to get this therapy--."

"I know that," she said abruptly. "If anything, he'll have to get it from me and Shizune. He won't change his mind, Sakura. He won't have you."

Sakura lowered her head. "Shizune doesn't have as strong a control as you or me; she won't be effective. You have duties as the Hokage and your sessions won't be regular enough to give him the best chance--."

Tsunade turned her head, jaw tight. "Well, Sakura. What do you want me to do? What I can, and what Naruto will allow? Or do you want me to keep pushing you on him, and get nothing done?"

It was difficult to swallow again. Sakura blinked rapidly. "Regardless of what's happened, you know that what I'm proposing is best, Tsunade. I just... I need an ally. Tsunade, you know I'm right!"

The Hokage's eyes lost their sharpness – she turned them to the window. "It would be better for him, physically. But I can't imagine how painful it is for him to see you." She bit her lip briefly. "He's only just recently started being happy again, and not for small moments. He smiles all the time, just like he used to. Unless we're talking about you." She took in her breath. "Sakura, I know you're sorry. And it hurts to hear the things that people say about you. But you brought it on yourself."

Sakura opened her fisted hands. The movement of blood into them was a sharp pain, then just a dull thudding.

"You've helped so much already," Tsunade said. "Your surgery was a success, and you engineered it all yourself. But there are other candidates, now that you've led us back to familiar territory." She folded her arms. "I've informed Muraki that he will be assembling a team to work on Naruto's back, along with me."

"Muraki doesn't have the endurance for an exhaustive surgery like that, Tsunade." Her voice had grown weak.

"He's second to you, Sakura--."

"But not even close to me; you'll have to shoulder seventy percent of the work with him." The tears were beginning to fall again, but she was tired; she didn't care to stop them. "I just want to give him the best chance, and this..."

Tsunade was silent for a moment. "I'm not going to fight Naruto," she said at last. "He's open to trying anything. He wants to be well. He isn't punishing you by forfeiting his chances of recovery; that's a selfish way to think of it, Sakura." She paused and tapped her hand against her folded arm. "He wants to get well; he just doesn't want you in his life. That's understandable. And I'm going to place his happiness before all of that. Even with improved chances, the probable outcome is that the surgery will fail. It's been too long since the injury. Don't you think he'll be more prepared to deal with that if he's happy? Adjusted? Accepted what's happened to him?"

Sakura folded her hands at her waist. They were heavy as her eyes. "I just want to fix things," she whispered.

"You can't," Tsunade said, voice soft. "Things are different now."

* * *

The sky was turning orange, and some shade of pink and purple that probably had some fancy name, but that he couldn't think of, so all he said was, "look at the sky..."

Ino nodded and wiped at her chin. "I forgot how messy watermelon is," she managed, and spat a seed into the grass.

"This one is extra messy," Naruto laughed. "I picked a good one."

She smiled up at him and nodded. "It was a good idea." She laid her legs off the porch. "I didn't realize how much I missed wearing shorts outside." Her eyes searched the sky. "And birds."

"Yeah... Shorts work for you, probably not for me." There was a network of veins beneath the skin of her thighs, faint, and a watermelon seed stuck to her knee. He turned his eyes to the birds she'd mentioned but the sky was empty. "Hey, Ino." He smacked her on the shoulder and left a watery smear on her shirt. Trying to wipe it away only made it worse. She wrinkled her brow at him. "I was just trying to get your attention to say thanks," he said, holding up a sticky hand. "For helping me out and everything."

"No problem," she said. She threw her empty rind into the yard and wiped her hands on her shorts, and studied the watermelon juice on her sleeve for a moment. "You know, honestly, I feel like it's been a while since I've done anything for anyone other than myself."

"You don't seem that way." He stretched his hands over his head. "When I think about what you went through with Shikamaru, the most fitting word seems to be 'selfless'."

Ino dropped her head and pulled her knees up beneath her elbows. "Well," she said. "Sometimes I think that was more selfish than anything." She fingered a faint scar that flared up the back of her neck and sighed. "You were a good friend to him, and he liked you a lot," she said. "He'd want me to help you." Her hand dropped away and she craned her head back up at him. "I like you too. You're a good guy. And I never thanked you for watching out for me those days. So I guess we're even now." She stood and tapped her fingers to his arm, then pointed vaguely inside. "I'm getting another slice. You want one?"

He pressed his hand to his stomach. "I have room." Beneath his shirt the skin over what had been his incision was smooth; the scab even was gone. Sometimes he felt a tingle in his skin, heat in his fingers or at the crown of his head, but his body felt lighter; he felt less tired. Colours, even, seemed stronger. Or maybe that was just because it was a beautiful evening, and a breeze was going, and he felt none of the anxiety that had hung heavy in his stomach.

Ino dropped a slice of watermelon into his hands and then sat on crossed legs. It was growing dark and the trees on the horizon were only shadows now.

"Thanks," he said. She nodded and smiled.

"The breeze is nice," she said, and he agreed:

"This is nice."

* * *

I hope you've enjoyed this chapter, too. The reader Sexy Kurenai mentioned that Sakura's character was being treated too leniently, which I think is true; I hadn't been writing very much about her, but she is going to be re-incorporated (since the story has focused for a few chapters more on Naruto's and Ino's interaction), and you'll be able to see more of how she's been affected by her actions, and also more about her relationship with Sasuke and Naruto. Thanks very much to all of the reviewers!


	13. Chapter 12

­They came at night and it was hard to tell them from the dark air until they grasped at his arms. Their hands were substantial, tight on his elbows. He glimpsed the ghost-like paleness of one exposed neck before his head was covered, and his mind melted, at some point, into sleep. He dreamt of the past in grainy images, the colours in too much contrast, as if to combat the blackness behind his lids.

He was young he'd spent hours trying to catch the tiny fish in a puddle beside a river, but he was too slow to grasp one in his fist. They were all smaller than his smallest finger and he wanted so badly to have them.

His mother wore a blue-checked dress and pushed his hair from his sweating forehead as he sat eating ice. His brother spat a chip on his head but he didn't mind, because it dripped, cold, down the back of his neck.

Sakura slept on her side in an open doorway, and as he stared past her at the grass that swayed where the homes of his cousins once stood he realized she wasn't enough, and he wondered why he thought she would be.

Naruto stood waiting with his face cloaked in white mist, so he turned his head from Sakura's kiss and rushed down the stairs, because even through that fog of breath he could see those blue eyes and how they fixed to her figure as soon as she left the shadow of the doorway. I shouldn't have come back, he thought, and Naruto smiled at him like nothing was wrong.

The light was bright and the shadows that flitted at its edges were blurred and brownish. "He's still," he heard. "Too much." There was sound but it was tinny and like a whisper to breathy and loud in your ear to understand. There were hands on his arms and a fist at the shirt on his back. He dreamt.

* * *

She caught him by the coffee machine and he seemed to know, already, what she wanted to talk about. He shifted his coffee from one hand to the other, then back, then set it on the table, steaming. "Haruno," he said carefully and nodded his head. "Good morning."

"Good morning," she answered, and pressed back the words bubbling inside her. She wanted to be level-headed. She didn't want to beg. "Muraki, I have a question for you."

He nodded again and pushed his hands into his pockets. "Is it about the surgery?"

"Yes," Sakura breathed. She was happy he understood, already. Had the same thoughts crossed his mind? That he wasn't the best doctor for the job, that agreeing to take her place would jeopardize Naruto's chances at recovery? "I wanted to ask you... Respectfully, I want to ask you to decline the position Tsunade has offered you."

He shifted again and glanced at his coffee, at his shoes, and finally he sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Sakura," he said, and she felt her heart drop at the familiar address, and the sympathetic note it carried. "I don't think I can do that." He stared down at his toes. "I don't think it would be right of me."

"I know you're a good doctor," she said quickly. "But this surgery is so chakra-intensive, and to give him the best chance... Don't you agree that you... this course of action would hurt his chances?" She'd clasped her hands at her waist, but she wasn't going to beg. She separated her fingers and held her arms straight at her sides.

"If you were able, yes, I would agree. But you can't be considered for this. And in your absence I'm the go-to guy." He lifted his eyes. "It's hard to say this to you, because I respect you, Sakura, but you'll never get a place on this surgery. The patient has strictly forbidden it, and if I step down, next in line in Shiraishi, not you." He took his coffee in his fingers. "I'm sorry," he said, "but that would hurt his chances even more." His hand lifted, as if he might place it on her shoulder, but instead he touched at his glasses. "I'll give you my word that I'll do the best I can," he said. "But that's all I can do."

He walked quickly away and Sakura stood unfisting her hands. Things have changed, Tsunade had said last night, and Sakura wondered why she had so much trouble remembering so. Things had always been that way; impermanent, fleeting. Sasuke's love was like that. Why did she expect Naruto to be any more constant, especially when she'd been such a ghost-like presence in his life? Why did she always expect time would stop for her?

At one point in her life, she held a sparkler in one hand and a beer in the other and she and Naruto squatted at the river pretending to write their names in the air over the water, and when she kissed him she meant it. Once, Sasuke said he needed her and she knew by the steadiness of his eyes that he was telling the truth. But then Naruto's touch seemed wrong; when he spoke annoyance itched at the back of her eyes. Sasuke didn't want her and when he said those words he stared at her as if with each second of silence he could drive those words deeper and deeper into her head.

What had she done wrong, that he would leave again for Itachi?

There was coffee in her hands. It slopped onto her finger but she only stared at it blankly.

"Cheer up," Shizune said. There was a plastic wrapped cheese tart in her hand and she held it out hopefully as she spoke.

Sakura pulled her eyes away from the sweet and they darted from Shizune's face to her Styrofoam cup steaming in her hands. She placed it on the table. "I don't like coffee," she managed, and turned from the room.

* * *

They promised they wouldn't execute him. How much had Naruto and Sakura had to beg? He'd already left once before. We should have executed him the first time, they said. Everyone wanted his blood. "Do you know how much letting him live damaged our communication with these countries?" was the question. "Do you know what _treason_ is?"

I'll bring him back again, Naruto said firmly. He won't leave again, said Sakura. And somehow – were the powers-that-be tired, maybe? - they won the promise: He won't be tried. He won't be executed. But the condition was, his release pended interrogation.

Interrogation. Maybe what that word entailed hadn't quite come to her until they arrived at the door to take him away. To have him executed was one thing; to have him die in the line of questioning was another. Late in the day Kakashi had looked out at the setting sun with a heaviness in his brow; dread. He won't say anything, he said. I wonder what that means for him.

Tsunade stared out over the city and it looked kind in the morning light. It looked quaint, almost, and she hated to worry on a day as beautiful as this. It wasn't worry for the Uchiha. Was it wrong to say she'd never felt compelled by him? It was worry for what his death might mean to Sakura and Kakashi.

What impact would his death have, she wondered, on Naruto? Things seemed to accelerate now; it was a race to avoid any further obstacles, delays on the road to his recovery. She rubbed at her forehead and her heart jumped at the rapping on the door. First there was just an arm dangled into the room, holding a paper bag. Then Naruto's grinning face.

"Breakfast," he called, "for the number one girl in my life."

Tsunade pressed her hands to the armrests of her chair. "Why are you here so early?" she barked. Her heartbeat was only now beginning to fall back into its natural rhythms again. Naruto wrinkled his lip.

"Can't you say thank you, old lady?" His face relaxed and he smiled again as he pushed further into the room. "Me and Ino felt like cheering you up. So here's some breakfast and good news."

Ino was quietly closing the door. "Sorry if you were busy," she said, and Tsunade rubbed at her temple briefly before relaxing slightly back into her chair.

"If it's good news," she sighed, taking the bag that Naruto held out to her. "Thanks," she told him, and he smiled, grabbing at a stray pen on her desk, glancing at the papers she had scattered there.

"So," he said after a moment. He lifted a page and put it down before looking at it. "You know how you were giving me all those reasons that... that she should do this therapy? You're busy, Shizune's forte isn't chakra, she has other patients..." He touched at the hair in his eyes and then pushed it back from his forehead. "Yadda yadda yadda."

Tsunade lifted a brow when he raised his eyes to hers. "And?" For a brief moment she wondered if he would agree, suddenly, to letting Sakura back into his life, if only for the therapy and surgery. But that was a hope too easily killed; he hadn't even used her name.

"Well, why can't Ino do it?" he asked, and lifted his chin toward her. She shifted and the hands she'd pushed into her pockets slipped free and joined themselves in front of her waist.

"If you'd just tell me what needs to be done," she said, and Tsunade was surprised by the animation in her face. "Maybe there's a manual that I can follow. And I know I'm a little out of practice but maybe my lack of efficiency could be overcome by increasing the sessions. It would be easy, since we live together." She suddenly took in her breath. "If I need to," she said quickly, "I can even close up the shop for a while."

"What?"Naruto craned his head back toward her. "You don't need to do that," he said.

She narrowed her eyes at him, head tilting. "I was trying to sell my enthusiasm, Naruto. Get a clue."

"Oh." He turned back to Tsunade. "She's told me she would also be willing to walk around Konoha twenty times, on her hands." He paused dramatically. "Blindfolded." Ino sighed loudly and he flashed a smile. "That's how enthusiastic she is. So does that work?"

Tsunade leaned back in her chair and took in her breath. Naruto's eyes were steady on her. "That sounds reasonable," she said, and folded her arms over her chest.

* * *

He'd worn orange for the longest time, and spoke louder than anyone, besides Gai, that Kakashi had ever known, so it had always been hard to miss him. Even when his favourite colours changed, and his voice grew deeper and more quiet, his laughter stayed strangely young, loud and open. If he hadn't heard it, he might have walked by the noodle stand; he thought, for a moment, about passing by anyway. Naruto sat inside laughing open-mouthed as Ino wrinkled a brow at him.

"Could you maybe tone it down?" she asked. "If that's too hard maybe we'll start with not showing your half-chewed food to the world."

Sakura had chided him for the same hundreds of times, but when Naruto wanted to laugh, he laughed, no matter what he might be doing. It was a quality that Kakashi had grown to admire, despite having been spat upon numerous times (and once even peed upon, but that was a story that all three of them – he, Sasuke, and Naruto – had agreed to forget). The Naruto he'd spoken to on the phone – how many weeks ago? - was too reserved too self-conscious. This laughter was something more real. He missed his students, he realized, hearing it. They'd all grown up and he was no longer their teacher, and they'd parted ways, and that was the course of life, easy enough to understand; but seeing how they'd changed made him nostalgic for that Sasuke, that Sakura, that Naruto that he had known.

Maybe he had been too optimistic. Sasuke had always been troubled; on missions they shared a tent and Kakashi listened to his nightly muttering as Naruto slept oblivious and half out of his sleeping bag. Most was nonsense, difficult to make out, but always was that name, 'Itachi'; sometimes 'mom'. Once he cried. Once he sat up and plunged his fist into Naruto chest, as if driving in a knife into his heart; the resulting fight tore down even Sakura's tent. When he returned home the first time, years ago, he'd said, "Every man dies with regrets, doesn't he, Kakashi?" The answer was yes, of course. He looked down at his cuffed hands. "That's what I realized. That's why I came back. Every man dies with regrets. Why should I be any different?" There had always been darkness in him, and even if he'd once seemed at ease with the past it was hard to believe otherwise now.

Sasuke had always looked backward; Naruto, forward; and Sakura turned as if to keep the balance between them. Anyone would say she had a beautiful smile, even though her laughs were forced, sometimes. But for as big as her smile grew, her annoyance could grow to larger proportions; her moods seemed controlled by her relationships. Once she'd lived with Sasuke she took on some of his seriousness; and he'd seen her hold hands with Naruto and smile like he did, widely. Her laugh, though, had never been anything but closed and careful.

Naruto laughed like children do; he was uninhibited in his happiness, bull-headed in his optimism, and it was for that reason – that he needed cheering up – that Kakashi pulled a chair forward and sat, uninvited, at the table. "It's been a while," he said, and Naruto smiled, slapped him on the shoulder and said, "you're late," as if time had never passed at all. Even the slight apology in his voice couldn't detract from the relief that Kakashi felt, seeing that grin.

Kakashi sat; Naruto punched at his shoulder and both pairs of eyes bent into nearly identical crescents. "I missed you," Naruto said, and Kakashi answered, "same here", and Ino scratched at the corner of her mouth because she knew her smile suddenly seemed weak. Wouldn't it be something if Asuma could sit next to her like this, and she could punch him in the arm and smile at him and say, 'where have you been, I missed you'? But thoughts like these were just part of growing up; the older you get the more things you lose, but the easier it gets to forget those things, or at least the pain you felt upon losing them. Ino watched Naruto try to sling his arm over Kakashi's higher shoulders and the scene pulled at the corners of her mouth.

"My chair's so low to the ground," Naruto stressed. "It's like I'm 12 again and you're two times my size."

Kakashi smiled wordlessly and Naruto's hand dropped from his shoulder. Ino stood. "Did you want some water or something? I'll get some." In her absence Naruto spun the noodles in his bowl. Kakashi touched at the back of his neck.

"It was a success," he said. "Your surgery."

"Of course," Naruto grinned. "Fate still has something in store for me." He suddenly leaned forward and stuffed a wad of noodles into his mouth. "Can't head the village from this chair, can I? Sorry, I spat." He mumbled around his food and wiped at his mouth with the back of his wrist.

"So what happens from here?" Kakashi asked.

"Therapy twice a day and monitoring of my chakra pathways for a month," he answered briskly, wrinkling his brow. "And I had better not skip a day." He smiled. "According to Tsunade. After that a final surgery. And then I'm cured and in position to kick the old lady out of office."

"Therapy twice a day..." Kakashi turned his head. Behind him, Ino was leaning against the counter and waiting for the cook to finish an order, her face cradled in a hand. "Ino's house is a ways from the hospital."

"Doesn't matter," Naruto mumbled. He turned his eyes to her and lifted his chin, swallowing the lump of food in his mouth. "_She's_ treating me for the most part. I only see Tsunade once a week."

Kakashi raised his brows. "Ino's treating you?"

"Yeah, why the face?" Naruto took an audible gulp of his tea. "Are you jealous of my beautiful live-in nurse?" he said loudly. He laughed when Ino's face tilted into view, tight with annoyance.

"Considering the situation you'd probably be the live-in," Kakashi sighed. "No, I was just wondering how long it had been since she practiced."

Naruto shrugged. "I trust her," he said easily. "She'll get me where I need to be." He looked up from his bowl and the corners of his eyes wrinkled. "So have I embarrassed you yet?" he asked.

"No," Ino muttered, and set a drink in front of Kakashi. "I've grown out of blushing, I told you." She sat with a huff. "The longer I know you the louder you get." She turned her eyes to Kakashi. "Is it the same for you?"

Kakashi narrowed his eyes. "You get used to the shrillness," he said seriously, after a moment.

* * *

There was a fuzziness round his eyes and Sasuke closed them. If he kept them open too long, he began to feel as if he couldn't breathe, as if the shadow in the corner were an entity sucking up oxygen and filling the room with stale, hot air. This grey room swallowed even the sound of breathing; it was wrapped in a quiet that drew skin into goosebumps and pulled pins across the senses. His wrists felt swollen and he passed his fingers over each of them in turn as his eyes opened on his bare feet, a spinning floor.

"Do you refuse to answer this question, too?"

Sasuke raised his head and wavering in his eyesight faceless bodies lined the walls of the room, unmoving. The examiner picked up his papers and straightened them, with a sharp _tack, _against the table, as if to draw his eyes. "So many people here," he said, and smiled instead of answering. "Do I scare you that much?"

"Well," the older man said. He stood and glanced over a page, leaning against the table. "You seem to come back so much stronger each time you leave. Precautions must be taken." He lifted his eyes from the paper he'd been reading. "We don't know what acquaintances you've met these few years."

Sasuke took a heavy breath and lifted his hand. "I could have you all killed with the snap of my fingers," he said, and snapped. A single body against the wall shifted and he smiled. "Is that the kind of thing you wanted to hear?" he asked. He crossed his arms over his churning stomach. "I didn't meet anyone I haven't met before."

"That doesn't tell us much of anything, does it?" His footsteps were loud in the air and he paced in front of his table.

"That paper on your desk tell you anything?" Sasuke asked, and looked away. "I've been through all of this before."

The examiner paused and stared into the air, as if his words were written there. "You left because you wanted to be stronger, and the wrong people promised you strength. Strength enough to kill your brother." His footsteps resumed, echoing, on the floor. "But you failed to find him." He laughed, mirthlessly. "What made you think a boy like you could find him when our most accomplished members couldn't?"

Sasuke's mouth tightened. "A boy like me," he muttered.

"He's still missing," the examiner said. "If you were trying to find him, you would have had to go through some bad people. And what could you offer them for the information they wanted? The most valuable thing you know is Konoha." He leaned forward, tilted his jaw. The cords in his neck were tight as he spoke. "We just want to know," he said, "what you told them."

Sasuke stood and the concrete beneath him was fuzzy and curved up beneath his feet. "A boy like me," he muttered. Bodies shifted in his periphery. "A boy like me," he said, "could bash your shit-filled head into the ground." The walls were speeding past him; there was a thick arm and a softer neck in his hands. But then it was black.

He'd seen him try to hold her hand, even through the rain. She was standing with an umbrella and he was in the rain. Did she even know he was there? His fingers touched at the fist she held at her side but her hand didn't open. He still held his hand out, waiting, when Sasuke lost sight of them in the crowd that had gathered to watch his return and stare at the train of men behind him, the masked ninja with his arms in their hands. Naruto. Loyal to a fault. Stubborn in his faithfulness. Why is it that he can't recall his face? It's just a blur; he's just a figure. It was the hand that he could remember so clearly, the way he touched his forefinger to her knuckles.

He'd known there was more than just friendly comfort contained within that gesture, at some level; but it was hard to resist that face, those eyes. He was too far away to see her clearly but in his memory her face is as close as his own would be in a mirror. The glassy green of her eyes, the set of her mouth. His eyes caught on her and what feeling had flooded through him? Happiness? Relief that someone had waited for him? It was something in the immovability of her face, the set of her shoulders and the rigidness of her back, that made him feel as if she'd waited there since he left, without moving.

He just wanted a reason to stay; some bond to combat the other, unhealthier one, to overcome that urge to leave. So he loved her.

* * *

She hated hot nights in an apartment; there is no porch, no wide door opening to the cooler air outside. The windows were open but the breeze never reached her and so Sakura laid in bed sweating and with an arm over her face to quiet the pounding in her skull.

Muraki was right, maybe. Naruto didn't want her near him; if she pushed, would he throw away the idea of further surgery completely, just to spite her? He'd never seemed vindictive but maybe, after being with her for so long, she'd coloured him somehow. It was easy for her to be mean when she was angry, it was easy to forget her sense of shame; where that had come from, she didn't know. Hadn't she had an easy life, comparatively? So Sasuke left her. So Naruto had left her, too. Kakashi was gone. Were they dead? There was a distance between her and everyone else in the village. But was it undeserved? What had been so terrible about her life? There were people who'd gone through worse.

Maybe she was just weak. She'd always been weak. Weaker in the body, and as she'd grown older, weaker in the mind. That's why she left Naruto for that man, the man wouldn't stay with her. That's why Sasuke was more important to her than Naruto was, and why she was so angry that he'd been so hurt, and why she'd pushed Naruto instead of pulling him into her arms, instead of kissing his poor, bruised face.

That man, she'd called him. Sakura pulled her arm from her forehead and her brain beat behind her eyes. How many times had she heard that phrase? Sasuke woke early and she found him on the porch with his head in his hands. He stayed up late and rubbed at his face. What's wrong, she'd asked him, because he seemed strange, and it hurt to see him suddenly cry. "Him," he said, and grasped at his hair, pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. "That man, all I can think about is that man." And he looked up at her as if she could do something about it, but what could she do? She wrapped her arms around his head and pressed his confused face to her chest, and told herself she'd make him stay; she only ended up driving him away. Time passed and when he hugged her his hands swept loosely against her shirt instead of settling on the small of her back; one day she woke and all of their clothes were packed away.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"I'm going to find Itachi," he said, without turning to her. "You're going home." He pulled his bag onto his back and it bit into his shoulder. Her suitcase sat propped against the wall. She grasped at it and it opened with such difficulty in her hands. Her clothes splayed out over the floor and she tossed them through the air until they littered the room.

"What are you talking about?" She pulled the strap of his pack from his shoulder. "This is my home!" He meant it, she realized, seeing the things he carried. He took her wrist in his hand and pulled the bag from her fingers, carefully, though she didn't make it easy. "What are you doing?" Her voice had gone high and desperate in her confusion. "What do you mean, go home? Where will I go?"

"Stay with Naruto," he told her.

"I'll wait for you," she told him.

"I'm not coming back until he dies." He opened the door and sunlight spilled onto his feet.

"What are you chasing him for? You're chasing nothing!" She slipped past him and took his shoes into her hands, and threw them across the yard, as if that would stop him. He only watched them fly, stared at where they landed. She slammed the door closed and he stared through it. Why wouldn't he look her in the face? "Killing him won't do anything; it won't change anything!"

"It's always been my dream," he said quietly. "I dream about it every night."

"It's not a dream," she told him. "It's an obsession. You're obsessed." His eyes flickered to her as the words left her mouth. She pressed her hand to his wrist. "Don't do this. Don't go. He could kill you."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I tried." He opened the door and stepped over the dirt and grass in his bare feet, and bent to put on his shoes. Why did something so mundane seem so solemn? "Naruto will take care of you," he said.

"If you leave I hope you never find him!" She was starting to cry. "If you find him, I hope you realize that killing him won't make you feel better. It won't matter! He's nothing; do you think revenge feels good?"

"Nothing feels good," he said. "Nothing feels good anymore. That's why I'm leaving." His jaw was a harsh line in the sun. "I don't feel love for anything, I don't feel happy for anything. All I think about is him. All I think about is what he did, and if I never do anything about it, what will I have lived for?"

"Me," Sakura answered, but her voice, for the moment had gone weak.

"You're not enough," he said, and his face was so open and honest at that moment that his words punched at her, caught her breath up in her throat. "But you have Naruto," he said. "And you were happy with him, weren't you?"

Analyzing all of his words was a long, painful process. She sat in Naruto's darkened living room and nothing had changed since she'd last been there. What did he mean, "I tried"? Tried to love her, and failed? What was he sorry for? Wasting time on her? Naruto turned on the lights and stood for a moment staring at her.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, and it hurt that he sounded so distant.

"He's gone," she said against her fingers. "He's gone to kill that man." She'd thought she was finished crying but tears slid from her eyes anyway.

His arms were familiar but she didn't feel safe within them. She laid her head on his shoulder but it seemed too angular. He didn't fit her anymore, but he held her like nothing was wrong, like nothing had changed, like he didn't mind that her elbow was pressed between their sides and the skin of his throat was too hot against the side of her face.

"Why didn't you call me?" he asked. "I'm sorry." His fingers were too stiff on her arm. "He'll come back," he said.

"He won't." She stared at her reflection in the window and hated the face that stared back at her.

"If you're here, he'll be back," Naruto said. How could he sound so sure, spouting lies like he was? "He loves you."

She pushed him away; a sweat had broken on her skin. "I just need a place to sleep," she said. There were the tears again. "Don't talk to me. I just want to sleep."

Sakura stared up at the fan with aching eyes and the pulsing of her brain against the back of her lids seemed timed with the lazy revolutions of the fan.

"I just want to sleep," she whispered, and pressed her eyes closed.

The phone rang and her eyes, cracking open, were flooded with light. There were noises from the street; people walking, talking; someone yelling. The phone. Sakura stumbled from bed and felt like weeping. Hadn't she just closed her eyes? Hadn't she only just fallen asleep?

"Sakura." The voice on the other end was clear and bright but she could only manage a nearly incoherent 'hello'. "Were you sleeping?" the voice asked.

Sakura steadied herself against the kitchen chair and struggled to blink her eyes clear. "Who is this?"

"Ino," said the voice. "I had some time today. I thought we could have lunch together."

"Lunch." Sakura's eyes flickered over the light in the window, the shadows it case on the floor. "What time is it?" Was she working today? she thought, but would it matter if she missed work? She had no patients; only paperwork. The nurses and doctors – her colleagues – were probably happy to see her absent. Maybe she's in the basement again, they were probably thinking. Good. Seeing her is too awkward.

"Sakura," came Ino's voice. She sounded less vibrant now, softer and more subdued, more like Sakura felt. "Are you OK?" She paused. "How about I come over? You busy?"

"Maybe..." Her eyes still hadn't cleared. "Later. Another day. I'm a little tired," she said.

Ino was silent and Sakura stood with the phone away from her face, rubbing at her eyes. "I miss you," said the phone, and Sakura blinked. Her eyes focused on a bowl in the sink in front of her. "I know you've always been kind of quiet, but it's been too quiet between us lately," Ino was saying. "I haven't called you. It's my fault."

"Another day." Sakura tucked the phone against her shoulder and shut the windows, pulled the curtains closed. "I'm tired." She sat on the bed, and laid back. She waited.

"OK," Ino said at last. "Tomorrow, maybe." She took in her breath, and it was barely audible. "Take care, then."

"I'll sleep." Sakura closed her eyes and the back of her lids still felt grainy. "Goodbye, Ino."

The room, even shadowed, was hot and stifling.

* * *

Ino pressed the phone to the cradle and laid her hand on it for a moment, as if hoping it would ring. Her fingers only slowly removed themselves; then they flipped through the manual that laid in front of her. _To stimulate a deadened nerve ending_, she read, and flipped the page. _It is crucial that the chakra applied remain constant and controlled; spikes in energy will cause damage to the nerve and chakra passages of your patient. _She stared at the diagrams. Chakra flow was marked in dashed red lines. The body illustrated was faceless.

"Were you talking to someone?" Naruto was suddenly at her shoulder, wiping at his neck.

"Just myself." She looked away from the manual and her eyes slid briefly over his face. "You're done with your exercises, I guess."

"Yeah." He smiled. "You need more time?"

Ino shrugged. "I'm ready when you are."

"'Cause you look nervous." He shrugged back at her. "Just saying. If you need time to collect yourself, that's cool. You're old now; it takes some time to start up."

"Just go lay down." She stood and tucked the manual, folded, beneath her arm. She turned her palms in circles against each other as she walked in front of him to the living room. "Honestly, it is going to take a while to warm up. It's been a few years." She watched him awkwardly maneuver himself from the chair onto the floor. "But you're in good hands, anyway."

"No problem," he said, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. "I trust you."

"I _was_ top of my class. Almost." She knelt, hands still working. The motion and the sensation of pins in her fingers was natural and easy to remember. She pressed her palms together, then pulled the manual from beneath her arm and unrolled it onto the floor beside her knee.

"Wait, is this like a surgeon reading a textbook while performing brain surgery?" Naruto asked. He reclined on his elbows, wrinkling a brow. "You aren't going to poke the wrong thing, are you?"

"I just want to make sure I'm doing this in the best order." Ino looked from him to the papers at her knee again. "Lay on your back first. And pull up your shirt; I'm going to need your stomach."

"OK, then." Naruto grasped at the back of his shirt and pulled it with some trouble over his head before leaning back. "Please, no comments on my lack of definition."

She pressed her hands to his stomach and ignored his flinching. "You shouldn't worry about that," she said, and her eyes slid back to the manual. "You're the type that muscles up." She lifted her hands and they drifted to his rib cage and then back to his stomach. "Depending on how this next surgery goes, I'd say there's a good chance you can get very close to your top condition." Her fingers itched. "If this goes well."

Naruto pressed his hands behind his head. "Well, it's all up to you. No pressure."

She smiled slightly, then sighed. "God." For a moment she pulled her hands away, fisting her fingers, shaking them out. "I can feel it. It's like a knot." Her hands opened above him again. "Does it bother you?"

"I get hot sometimes. Antsy, too, I guess." He stared up at the ceiling, frowning, and Ino wondered if there was something more.

"The chakra pools," she explained. "If it gets bad just tell me. I can draw the excess out." She passed her hands over his leg. "It's because this knot of nerves in your back... Your injury is drawing at your chakra, and usually it's good to have chakra flowing within in an injury but here it's just pooling. It has to circle naturally through your body, so it can stimulate the nerves in your legs." She pulled at his elbow and his eyes fell from the ceiling and to her face. "Put your arms to your sides."

The corner of his mouth tweaked down. "Can't I get a pillow, then?"

"The flow to your upper half is kind of sluggish," she mumbled.

Naruto blinked. "Your hand is getting really hot."

"Well, you're going to have to deal with it."

"Don't burn my face! This face is all I have left!" He squeezed his eyes shut as she passed her hands over his head. "I'm gonna yell like this until you get me a pillow." She passed her hands over him without a word, over his arm and back, down one side of his body to his foot, over his stomach, as if tracing an outline. "Ino," he said.

Her eyes flickered to him only a second. 'C7. No, C6. Remember that, OK?"

"C6." The heat that poured from her hands was uncomfortable. He closed his eyes as her fingers passed once again over his head. "What's that?"

"For me to mark out the worst nerve damage."

He opened his eyes and they fixed on the sweat drop navigating the scars that marked her cheek. She didn't seem to notice it.

"C9," she said.

"C6 and C9." He lifted his arms to fold them behind his head, but her mouth's corner twisted and he remembered he was supposed to lay still. "I feel like I'm playing bingo or something."

"Except that C isn't a column in bingo."

"Yeah, except that." Her hand tingled over his hip and then there was nothing until her fingers moved back up from his leg and to his stomach again.

She sighed. "You doing OK?" She spoke without moving her gaze from her hands. "If the heat starts getting painful..."

"I''m good." The sweat drop touched at her jaw line and she lifted her shoulder to wipe it away as he lifted his head to look at her. "You?"

She smiled slightly. "You have a lot of excess chakra to draw off; it's kind of tiring. But next time it won't be as uncomfortable for us. You'll have less to pull away after this session."

Naruto took in his breath and closed his eyes as her palms drifted over his forehead again. They passed and it felt as if the sun was throwing a stray ray over his face. "Do you really think I can get like that?" he asked.

"Like what?"

"Like I was before," he said.

Ino suddenly pressed her hands together, wiggled her fingers. "Let me help you onto your stomach," she said. "Hands at your sides."

"I mean," Naruto said, turning, "will I be almost 100%?" There was heat against his back. He wanted to wipe at the back of his neck but kept still. "Tsunade doesn't seem to think so."

Ino shifted and he stared at one bare knee that came to rest near his face. Her hand touched briefly at his lower back but then he felt nothing else. "If your surgery works," she said, "since you're the kind that bounces back quickly, in that case I think you'd surprise a lot of people with how natural your motions and reflexes become." Her fingers pressed themselves to the back of his neck. " And if it doesn't work, you're the kind that has the work ethic to make the best of it. Either way, I think you'll improve." Her face tilted briefly into view. "Do you feel like your chakra circulation is any better? It feels less sluggish already."

"I feel good," he smiled, one cheek pressed to the floor. "My skin is burning, but that's fine. No pain, no gain."

"What were those numbers?" she asked, and he answered:

"C6, C9," and fell asleep listening to her pen scratch at paper. He hadn't even realized he was tired. He dreamt that he climbed a hill to watch the sun break through the clouds at the top, and the sky was blue. He stood staring up and laughed.

* * *

Hello, I hope you've enjoyed this longer chapter. I made some last second changes, but hopefully there aren't any mistakes in this chapter. I'm sure you noticed them in the last chapter; I caught them while reading over as I wrote this and the one where I wrote "for a moment" four sentences in a row was just ridiculous. I think I was looking for the best place to put that phrase and then forgot what I was doing. If it annoyed you as much as it annoyed me, I apologize. (I say it annoyed me and yet I haven't fixed it yet. I'll try to get that done.)

I appreciated the comments and critiques for last chapter, and I hope I've carried the intensity you enjoyed through to this chapter.


	14. Chapter 13

Naruto pulled his shirt over his face, and it was still damp with sweat. "Call me names, then," he said loudly. "You'll miss me when I can walk again. I'll walk right out of here."

The skies were cloudless and blue and when he stared up at them it was easy to ignore the occasional pain that came of Ino's sessions, or the buzzing feeling he got in the tips of his fingers. He liked the summer, even if he didn't care for the dampness that soaked into his shirts and made his hands slippery against his wheels. When his head emerged from his shirt she was scribbling onto her notebook braced against her bent leg. "Why would I miss you?" she mumbled, and closed the book before he'd drawn close enough to read what was within it. She told him that he had a good chance of recovery, but what she wrote in that book – the book she showed to Tsunade – might be another story.

She wasn't the kind of person to lie to make you feel better, though. And anyway, he felt the improvement. Even when Ino grimaced at the state of his chakra he felt better than he had a in a long time. They'd taken to going on walks in the early night, when there was a chance (a small one) that a breeze might blow, and when the sun had quit its blinding shine. It was too help rid him of the extra chakra, Ino said, and to help her relax. The first night had been a little taxing – she lived in the hills, after all – and she ended up pushing him and grumbling about how completely _un_relaxing the evening had turned out to be.

It was because his chakra still moved by fits and starts, puddling up in him and leaving the rest of his body heavy, and the next morning she dragged it out and around, coaxing it into proper paths; but still he'd ended up lead-armed. Rather than have her complain about carting him around again, he thought that he'd simply let go and coast back down the hill he'd been trying to scale, but that only ended up making her complain more. She screamed at him to put on the brake, sprinting furiously after him; she screamed at him because putting on the brake made him topple over and skid into the bushes; she screamed at him for not warning her that the bushes he'd entangled himself in were full of thorns. Then she screamed at him for acting so recklessly so close to an important surgery. But he held his scratched arm to his face before they reached home (Ino complaining the whole way) and saw it was already healing, and remembered that he was one step closer to being better – so close - and he was happy. Things got easier each day but whether that was more thanks to Ino's effort than his, he wasn't sure. In any case, at some point during these walks he stopped having to rely on her and she trusted his intelligence enough to wander away from him instead of hanging back at his elbow ("in case you pull some idiotic stunt again").

When she walked ahead it was easy to see how lost she could get in her thoughts. She sped up and seemed to forget about him. She lost the habit of turning her head to the side so her hair fell over the worst of her scars. She gazed up at the sky with her eyes narrow and squinting, as if trying to see something far off in them. If he asked her what she was thinking about her answer was always one of three: a shrug, a smile, or a wrinkled brow and the word "you".

Even though she looked worried when saying it the corner of his mouth tugged up whenever he heard it. Sometimes it was just nice to know he was being thought of.

* * *

Ino meant to call her back. The next day, in fact, first thing in the morning, or at a decent hour; but Naruto distracted her. He said, 'let's visit Iruka', and there she went, as if she had nothing else to do, and the day was gone before she realized she'd forgotten anything. She thought to call during her lunch break but Naruto was with her and chatting away with an old woman who'd just had her hair cut for her 50th anniversary. It felt wrong to call Sakura in front of him. Throughout the day there were customers, and the register needed to be cleaned out, and then Naruto grasped her by the wrist because he "smelled something delicious cooking outside" and so she ended up sitting next to him while the banners of a takoyaki stand flapped against her shoulders. And the next day, she watched him staring up at a few wispy clouds and laid down at his side (just for a few minutes of quiet after a hectic day at work and a therapy session that left her fingers burning). But the few minutes that she planned turned into hours and then it was too late to call. Tomorrow, she told herself, when she was about to climb into bed and the thought struck her. I'll call her tomorrow.

It had been a week.

So when Tsunade hovered over Naruto, touching at his stomach and feeling along his spine, she excused herself and walked quickly toward that office, in the west wing. Hers once stood beside it. She'd gotten pretty good, after all; they'd given her a nice furnished room with a window, and a plastic plate with her name on it had decorated the door. She had students that followed her when she worked there. They even asked her to take up a more permanent position, but she loved being with her boys too much, even if the work was harder. She didn't want to be home alone when they left the village and stepped into out into danger. The hallway seemed strange, though, or maybe she didn't remember it correctly. She tapped Naruto's notebook to her thigh as if to dispel her thoughts.

A nurse in heels passed and she turned toward her, raising her arm to the door. "Do you know if Dr. Haruno is in?" she asked. Her name was still there on the door. The woman only gave her a perplexed look and continued on her way, ruffling papers. She was young; what medic would wear heels so high and uncomfortable, even if she was just working the hospital? Ino watched her retreat with a wrinkled lip and laid her hand on the door's handle. It turned beneath her fingers.

"I'm in." Sakura's face was framed in the door's opening for a moment before she pulled it wider. "Ino." She blinked and the corner of her mouth twisted slightly in a way that Ino only realized was apologetic when she spoke. "I'm sorry. You wanted to get together..."

Ino let a smile widen on her face. "I know you're at work, but..." She held up the notebook in her hands and Sakura's eyes traveled slowly over it. "I thought you might want to know how he's doing." She slid into the room and Sakura stepped back only slowly, hardly allowing her room to close the door. In the moment that Ino glanced up at her face and saw the dark skin still stretched beneath her green eyes, she reached out and pushed her bright hair from her face. Sakura had combed it back and maybe that was what made her look older. It was fine beneath Ino's fingers. "You look good," she said quietly, and Sakura's mouth twisted again.

"Thanks," she said softly. The corner of her mouth unscrewed itself, and tugged upward. "You do too."

Ino took a breath and Sakura looked away and to the window, and turned to tug its curtain away and let in some light. "I thought you might be sick," Ino said. "You sounded strange on the phone."

"Just a bad night." Her voice came out in a sigh as she turned back to sit at her desk. It was strewn with the kind of paperwork Ino always hated; dry cases on paper in need of prescriptions or second opinions, and students' work to be graded. There was a book there on the corner of her desk, but it was partially covered with a manila folder and an empty cup sat on top of that. "So that notebook is..?"

Ino sat and crossed her ankles before holding the book out over the desk. "My notes on him." Sakura quickly flipped open the cover and scanned its pages. "We haven't improved by leaps and bounds," Ino continued, "but it's going well." She watched Sakura chew at her lip and then her green eyes lifted, wide.

"The injury isn't drawing at all of his chakra anymore? Have you already forced it back into a normal circulation?"

There was so much excitement in her voice that Ino was hesitant to admit the actual results. "No," she sighed. "His chakra's a little abrasive and hard to control. It isn't flowing through his legs like it needs to be, but he's with Tsunade now, and I know that the more I work with him the better it will get. We aren't there yet, but..." She picked up a stray envelope and began tearing it into strips. "I think we're doing good."

Sakura's frantic reading slowed in the quiet moment following; she flipped the pages thoughtfully. "He eats radishes now?"

Ino lifted her head. "What?"

"Radishes." She turned the book to Ino and tapped her finger to a word on the crowded page. "You were recording what he ate. I thought I remembered him hating them. Hating vegetables in general."

Ino laughed slightly, shrugging. "Honestly, I don't know. I thought he ate everything."

Sakura's eyes fell back to the page. The more pages she flipped, the nicer the writing got; the nicer the words. If she searched a few months back, her entries started with _Today the asshole..._ or something equally, if not more, derogatory. That had disappeared by the latest entry, which was instead filled with quick and squared off notes on his chakra flow: the organs near which it pooled, the trouble it had flowing into certain areas. Then a carefully printed, more complete breakdown of the session's notes. Following that, messier text: _Doing well, but has fallen asleep every session. Is it something I do? Am I not as tuned into his chakra flow as I should be?Seems too sluggish... Getting tired of wiping his drool from the floor._ A doodle or scribble, a series of loops, as if she was clearing her pen. _I'm pretty sure I used to have a different affect on the opposite sex. _

"I didn't know he ate radishes," she said, and then pressed her eyes shut. Why was she so hung up on that stupid detail?

"I guess he does," Ino shrugged. She was folding a strip of paper into a fat star.

Sakura closed the book and held it out in one hand. "Muraki is doing the surgery. Do you remember him? He was in the year lower."

Ino's mouth set, widened into a thoughtful grimace and then curved into a slight smile. "I think I remember him being a detail guy." She nodded and shaped the point of the star in her hand. "That's good, then." Her blue eyes flickered up. "You aren't OK with that though, are you?"

Sakura swallowed. The notebook was still in her hands and so she placed it quietly on the desk in front of Ino. "It doesn't matter whether it's OK with me or not." She turned her eyes to the window and could make out Tsunade's face there in the rock, staring in at her. "Sasuke is alive and Naruto may walk again. That's all I have and that's all I'll get. _I _can't expect anything more."

Ino's fingers had stopped their craft as soon as Sakura's words spun out into the air. They weren't new; she'd had them in her head. The more she poured over her life the more it seemed as if she'd never grown out of being useless; it was an illusion that she'd cast over herself, the idea that she was getting older and wiser and stronger. She hadn't been able to stop Sasuke, and she couldn't find it in herself to give Naruto what he wanted, either. It was no wonder, she thought. It was no wonder that they'd grow to resent her; that she would find a way to mess things up even with Naruto, who could find the strength to forgive the man responsible for Jiraiya's death. He wasn't strong enough to forgive her. At night she'd stared at photographs because dreams of Sasuke woke her up, and thoughts of Naruto kept her from sleeping. There was all the evidence she needed. Here, Sasuke's mouth curved upward but his eyes were out of focus, and Naruto was a darker figure, too far from the flash, gazing at her back. And here, Naruto's smile looked wider than she ever remembered it being, his chin seemed so comfortable resting on her head, his fingers so natural on her arm. She had been something important to him, and she abused that position, so close to his heart.

"I can't make it harder on anyone else just because it will be easier on me," she said quietly. It seemed like a while since she'd spoken. She blinked and her eyes were dry and tacky on her lids. Ino was still paused in the midst of her craft, gaze lowered to the paper in her hand. "That's all I've ever done."

Ino's fingers, paused in their motion, began to move again. "It's thanks to you that he has this chance, at least." Her words were careful. Outside there was yelling; children out of class. It was getting late in the afternoon and somehow the realization brought a sweat to Sakura's brow. She wiped her face and took in her breath.

"He seems happier now that he isn't living with me, doesn't he?" She said quickly, and opened the folder on her desk. "I'm glad. I'm glad that I know someone so good is taking care of him." She paused. "Tsunade will probably schedule him for the end of the month. Three weeks."

Ino pulled the notebook into her hands, brow suddenly wrinkled. "Three weeks? We're going at a good pace but I don't know if three weeks is enough--."

"--It's too much." Her voice sounded tired, she realized, or sick, like Ino said. She cleared her throat. "Naruto's healing capabilities are beyond the norm. Now that chakra is moving more freely through his body it's going to start sealing off any broken parts of his system, and bypassing them. In three weeks the number of pathways to his legs they'll have left to manipulate will be small. The surgery will become more complicated, and the chances of its success are going to drop."

"Of course... His chakra..." Ino stood slowly. "You could have had him ready in two weeks. Maybe by now, even," she said, and there was something strange in her voice. She smiled, shrugging her shoulders. "You were always number one when it came to this stuff."

I don't even count, Sakura wanted to say, but instead she uncapped her pen and said, "You should show that notebook to Tsunade."

"She reads it." Ino shifted from foot to foot. "Tsunade, she realizes..?"

Sakura straightened the down-turned corner of her mouth. "Everyone knows his chances are almost down to nothing." Her pen faltered on the paper; she couldn't speak and write at the same time. Her mind was too scattered. "But if there's a chance, he'd be the one to make it." And for a moment there was only the sound of her hesitant scrawling on paper.

"We should do lunch sometime," Ino said suddenly, as if dispelling the strange silence that had hung in the room following Sakura's words. "To talk more," she continued. "Maybe if I have questions about him."

"Naruto wouldn't like you talking to me."

"Well..." Her voice faded away for a moment, then regained its strength. "That doesn't matter. And I don't even know if that's true."

Sakura's pen was still on the paper, bleeding ink. She lifted it away. "He hates me. He can't even stand to see me. He can't even stand to hear my name."

"You hurt him." Ino mumbled the words. "I don't know how to help you, Sakura. I want to, after all of the things you've done for me, but..."

"Just make him well," she said quickly. The words she'd written weren't making sense. She tried to read over them but the hallway's sounds were low and hollow in the room, and distracting. She rubbed at her eyes.

"Sakura." Ino hovered at the door. "It's OK to slow down."

The pen was hard in her hand. It pressed painfully against her fingers and she set it down. "I just have so much to do. I can't focus like I used to, and first it was my mother calling - she's been calling me every day - and then you're here and I have all of this paperwork but I can't do two things at once..." She lifted her eyes and Ino's lips tilted into a smile, creasing her eyes.

"Just slow down. And I left you a present," she said, and gestured to the table. Seven rounded stars sat beside her name plate. "I can't make cranes but maybe those are as lucky." She closed the door.

* * *

By the middle of the second week Tsunade was seeing the kind of progress she'd hoped for, and it almost distracted her from that worry eating at the back of her mind. Ino had asked, once, but she deflected her question in front of Naruto's eyes with an ease she hadn't thought she could muster. It was because she felt that tension in her shoulders lessen when Naruto turned his smile in force upon her that she lied. Even Sakura seemed to have realized the importance of his happiness, and quieted. Her words to Muraki – promptly relayed to Tsunade by the man himself – could be excused.

"Ow! What are your man hands doing to me?" Naruto rolled his eye back toward her and she pulled her fingers from the skin of his shoulders to flick his forehead.

"Maybe that's too keep you awake. Apparently you fall asleep as soon as Ino touches you." Tsunade tugged his shirt over his shoulder blades and helped him swing his legs over and off of the examination table. "You should try staying awake so you can tell her if anything feels wrong," she said, as he slid back to rest against the wall behind him. "And you should be trying to sit up on your own more."

"Will do." Naruto rubbed at his stomach briefly before pushing himself forward. He wobbled for a moment, steadied himself with a hand, and then flashed her a winning smile.

"Ino's doing well with you," she said, returning his grin with a tight-lipped one. "Maybe I should have asked more from her earlier on, but she's worried me before." She sighed and rubbed the burn from her hands, and put them on her hips. "She seems confident again, though. You two seem to have a healthy rapport going."

Naruto laughed, eyes searching the ceiling. "Yeah. I annoy her and she yells at me. Seems healthy to me." He rubbed at his arm, then the back of his neck. "At least her hands aren't as freakishly strong as a certain old lady I know. That's good." He leaned on one hand and his face was suddenly more serious. "So if things are going good, what do you think?" he asked.

"We'll set a date." Tsunade nodded. "I'm going to set a date because I think that in another two weeks Ino can have your chakra circulating on its own. The week after that you'll come in." She leaned forward and grasped his face in one hand. "That means no slacking."

"I got it." His mouth puckered between his pressed cheeks. "But talk to Ino, she's the slacker. All she ever wants to do is eat. That's why she doesn't have that figure anymore."

"Hm?" Tsunade released Naruto's face and the grin that quickly spread there was wide and toothy. He wasn't talking to her; his eyes, crinkling, shifted to rest above her shoulder as the door behind her closed. Ino stood in the doorway with her arms wrapped around a paper bag, her jaw hard and squared, and Naruto laughed, loudly.

"She's so mad," he wheezed. "She's so mad she can't even talk!"

There it was, that _playfulness. _She could call it that whenever his teasing wasn't directed at her, at least. Tsunade smiled back at him, even though his eyes weren't on her. To think she'd doubted that he would ever smile again. If he didn't, he wouldn't be Naruto.

* * *

He didn't mean what he said about her figure. She had a nice one, when he happened to look, every once in a while. He noticed in passing, really. Or, if he was to say it honestly, he noticed it a lot. But maybe that was just because she was at his side all day, everyday; and even closer two times a day; and at those times what else does he have to look at but her?

He noticed her hands, too: that her nails were short and sometimes looked bitten, and that surprised him because she didn't seem nervous. But once he'd taken in every feature of her hands his attention had started wandering, and eventually he'd just closed his eyes rather than take the chance that his mind might meander away and leave his gaze fixed on some undesirable point. _Undesirable_ meaning, for example, the fist he might get in the face if she happened to notice him staring at the freckle beneath her collarbone and assume he was staring at something else. He wasn't a pervert, despite having lived and studied with a couple. He noticed her eyes as much as anything else, because of how focused and sharp they were when she concentrated. They put him at ease, somehow. Now they regarded him curiously, studying his reaction with feigned innocence, and he had to say he didn't like that look as much as the thoughtful one she had while working.

"Why aren't you eating?" she asked carefully. She rubbed at the corner of her mouth, as if to erase the smirk there. Naruto saw it, though.

"Are you serious?" he asked. He'd said it before as she laid out their plates for dinner, but she only smirked. "Are you serious? You don't have any thing else hidden somewhere?"

"Anything else like what?" she asked, and pressed a leaf of lettuce into her mouth.

The salad on his plate seemed to wilt before his eyes. "Like... more meaty." She blinked at him and for a brief moment he believed that she really was mad, and that there was nothing but vegetables in the house. Maybe it showed on his face; he felt like his eyes were too wide so he looked away. "I can't be ready for surgery if all I'm getting is rabbit food, Ino," he grumbled.

"After what you said I thought I should get back to my former glory, you know? You'll just have to go along for the ride. For support." She rested her chin on her hand and narrowed her eyes. "We won't be eating meat for a while. Noodles are a no go. So is anything with over 8 grams of sugar per serving." She smiled suddenly. "Or anything that you say you feel like eating."

"Then I feel like eating salad," he said quickly, but she only shrugged and stabbed at a tomato on her plate. "C'mon, I smelled something really good, too. Where are you hiding it? The oven?" He pushed his plate away and had maneuvered himself around the table, almost reaching the stove, before she stood with a sigh.

"Yeah, yeah, OK."She pushed his hand from the oven door. " Seriously, a salad every once in awhile isn't going to kill you." She held a pan in front of his eyes and he grinned automatically. "Is fish good enough for you? I even got you a beer for after." She grasped one handle of his chair and swung him round with effort before kicking a tire. "So get to the table and stop complaining."

"Beer! The beverage of summer," he shouted. "You're like an angel from heaven."

* * *

Ino held the can to her neck but it was closer to empty than full, and had gone lukewarm, and didn't provide that much relief from the humidity of the night. She propped her arms on her knees and stared out into the darkness. One beer wasn't enough to get any one drunk, or give anyone courage, or loosen any tongues, and she wished she'd brought more so she'd have an excuse to ask the questions she wanted to. One beer wasn't enough to cushion any blows. She looked over to Naruto and held her can out to him. "Want the rest of mine?"

He brought his own can to his lips, swallowed, and wrinkled his brow. "Gross. No. Indirect kiss." He looked away from her and out into the blackness of the yard as she lowered her arm, dropping the can at her side.

"Indirect kiss. Ha. That brings back memories." She stretched, pushing her legs out onto the lawn. The grass there was prickly and dry against her heels. He'd turned his head back to her and she tilted her face up to him. "I don't like the addition of gross, though."

He shrugged, drank again. "Everyone knows the saliva is all at the bottom of the can," he said. "Anyway, I don't drink after strangers."

"I'm not a stranger."

He paused and nodded. "I guess not. But you are gross."

"I like being an 'angel from heaven' better." Ino rubbed away the sweat that had gathered on the back of her knees, sighing. "So all of these hurtful words are payback for the salad?"

"Nah." Naruto lifted the tab on his beer and flicked it, first one way, then the other. His eyes flickered to her. "I don't really mean what I say, half the time." He smiled and she dropped her gaze to her knees. It would be dumb to bring Sakura up like this, when he was so relaxed. The surgery was what she was worried about, anyway. Naruto was excited for it, of course, and she was happy, too; happy that Tsunade had given her the opportunity, happy she had the skills to help. But Sakura could have him ready sooner. Tonight Ino felt that itch on her palm as she passed over his back, that pinch in the meat of her hand, and those signs worried her more than they had yesterday, even if the chakra she raked through his body was moving more smoothly. Time was of the essence with injuries like Naruto's. After half a year, for anyone else, the damage would be completely irreversible. Maybe three more weeks wouldn't make a difference, this far in. Tsunade seemed to believe so. But Sakura... Not so much.

"Sakura." Ino blinked and shut her mouth tightly. Her own voice surprised her; it seemed like the cicadas had been surprised too, and shut up, and left her outburst hanging in the silence. Maybe one beer _could_ loosen your tongue. Or make you stupid. Beside her Naruto cleared his throat, and then returned to flicking the tab of his can as if she hadn't said anything at all. Ino pulled her legs to her chest. "Naruto."

He answered only after a few more flicks, as if hesitant. "Yeah?"

"She would be a lot more helpful than I am."

He exhaled sharply, something derisive. "I doubt that."

"For the surgery, she would be. For this therapy, she would be." Ino stared at his squared jaw for a moment before looking away. He was angry but it wasn't like she could stop talking now, and leave it hanging over their heads. "I just think--."

"Have you been lying to me, then?" he interrupted. When she lifted her eyes to him he was pulling the tab from his can. He dropped it into his beer and turned to her when she still hadn't said anything.

"Lying about what?" she asked quickly.

"You said I'm doing well. That I could make a full recovery." His eyes narrowed on her. "You were lying about that."

Ino straightened. "No, I wasn't. You are getting better every day but--."

"So there's a chance that I could recover," he said loudly, covering her voice with his own. "There's a chance that I could walk again."

"There is but--," she started to say, and he interrupted again, with a brief and sudden smile:

"Then what does it matter if she's more helpful? Without her I still have a chance." He looked away from her, finally, and began pushing in the aluminum in his hands, face stiff with concentration. Ino pressed her fingers into her hair and felt at the scar she found there, behind her ear.

"I mean if I was as good as her your chances could be better," she said, even though she knew he wanted the talking to stop. He flattened the middle of the can, then pressed the top and bottom together. "It makes a difference," she said, more forcefully than she wanted.

"As long as there's a chance," he mumbled, "I'll take it. I don't need her." He tossed the flattened can onto the porch beside him and sighed. "Do you have anymore of those?" She shook her head and he turned his eyes again to the night. "Damn. And I was having a good time."

Ino rested her chin on her knees. "I shouldn't have said anything." She stared ahead as well. The silence was different from the one they'd shared while drinking. "I should have kept my mouth shut."

"Yeah." Naruto rubbed at his face. "You should have."

"Well, we can't stop now." Ino lifted the can beside her leg to her mouth. It tasted terrible, had lost all of its coldness. "When," she started, and swallowed again. "When are you going to stop hating her?"

He blinked, but didn't pull his eyes from the amorphous darkness in front of them.

"Because she's still a friend of mine," she finished. She wet her lips and drank again, and Naruto took a breath and sighed.

"I don't think I hate her," he mumbled. "That's the problem." He pursed his lips, biting at the inside of his cheek. "I wish she was dead a lot, though."

"No, you don't." Ino laid her forehead on her folded arm and wondered why she'd always felt the need to have every little thing out in the open. A badger, Shikamaru had called her once. She should have stopped. She shouldn't have even started the conversation in the first place. She hid her face in her arms and sighed. "You don't mean that. I know you don't."

"I do, though."

"Trust me. You don't."

"Yeah. I do." His voice sounded far away. "That doesn't mean anything, though." His hand touched at the back of her head and she lifted it. "If you're gonna talk about this crap you should buy more beer." He pushed her hair behind her ear with heavy fingers, as if he was trying to see her eyes and gage whether she was lying. "She talked to you about talking to me?"

"No. I talked to her." Her gaze flickered over his face but he was hard to read. "She's quiet."

"Whatever. I don't care." His hand dropped away and he pointed to the beer beside her. "I'll take the indirect kiss. And whatever diseases come with it. And we'll stop talking about depressing things."

"Naruto." The next words out of her mouth might have been an apology – that's how she planned them anyway – but Naruto interrupted again, and waved her words away, irritated, like he was chasing away a mosquito.

"Stop, Ino. I like you more when you're teasing me." He took her beer and the last swallow in it, and set the empty can on his knee to pull up the tab. "I don't care what anyone is saying. You're great and I'm great and everything is gonna turn out great." The tab broke away and he sighed. "Maybe you could believe in yourself a little more. That might help."

For some reason those words and the way he muttered them under his breath pushed some irrational tendril of anger into her throat. "I do believe in myself." She unfolded her legs and then abruptly pulled them back to her chest, suddenly full irritation with him. "Shit. Sorry if I'm worried about you."

"Sarcasm isn't a nice way to end an argument, Ino."

"We weren't arguing." She pulled at the dry grass beside her feet. "But I guess I'll apologize for bringing shit up." She pressed the wrinkle between her brows away and took in her breath. "Sorry," she said.

"Yeah. You pretty much ruined a nice evening. But we can forget about it." Naruto flattened her can and then whipped it out into the darkness. "It's gone." Then he smiled and pushed her until she smiled back.

* * *

On workdays they woke early to get in a session before opening shop; Ino in the hour after Naruto because he woke first to exercise. The first customers were always elderly, the early risers out and about picking things up for their morning tables. Lunch was usually short and they walked down the street to eat whatever Naruto happened to crave; sometimes they took an hour to visit someone or other. When Konohamaru was in town he and Naruto met and huddled together whispering about things Ino didn't care to know; by the way Konohamaru was constantly pantomiming breasts she was sure she knew the nature of the conversation anyway, and it was easy to turn her thoughts turned to Sakura, and the steady way she refused invitations to talk, saying "I have work. Things have piled up." Hinata was a favourite to visit, because her baby " finally got cute" and wasn't in "the ugly alien baby stage anymore" according to Naruto. She invited them to a get-together to celebrate her two-year anniversary, and Naruto was quick to suggest she do something extravagant, because his guess was that the marriage wouldn't last much longer. Kiba wasn't in the next room so his comment didn't elicit the reaction he was hoping for; instead it floundered in the air and Ino was left to smooth things over after Hinata pulled her aside and asked if she and Kiba really seemed on the verge of some kind of break.

Boys came in before closing time to get flowers for their girlfriends; men came in to pick things up for their wives. After the sign was turned over and the door locked, Ino spent a thirty minutes cleaning and counting and ordering for the next day while Naruto pretended to be helpful by spritzing flowers at random. Dinner was eaten at home and after that was exercise, a session, and then an aimless walk. Sometimes they stayed up to talk; sometimes Naruto was too busy stuffing his face with ice cream or watermelon or chugging iced barley tea (to which he added too much sugar, in Ino's opinion) to talk; sometimes Ino was tired and fell to bed as soon as her shower was over. Days passed with a comfortable regularity; one week slipped by, and another; Naruto improved in steady, if small, increments.

Tsunade grew more optimistic in steady, if small, increments. She saw that Sakura worked silently at the kind of mundane things that had filled her days before Naruto returned; she heard that Sasuke would say nothing to his interrogators and whether his malaise was caused by anything other than the inhibitors they gave him, she wouldn't know. Apparently he'd asked for Kakashi several times, but she worried about what words he might want to pass on, and what motives he had for that meeting, and it was only when Naruto's surgery came into view, just a week away, that she finally relayed the message. "You can't tell him anything," she told him. "Naruto doesn't even know he isn't in the hospital any longer."

Sasuke didn't ask for a message to be passed on. He didn't even seem to realize Kakashi was in the room for the first 30 minutes of semi-wakefulness. He laid unmoving on his side when Kakashi entered, and he looked lumpish and inhuman in the shadowed room. He laid unmoving when the medic – gloved and masked – depressed the plunger of his syringe into his heavy arm. "He'll be more lucid soon," he was told, but it wasn't until an hour passed that he began to stir. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling with a strange raptness, unblinking. He lifted his neck as if to sit up but the rest of his body stayed pressed to the ground and after a moment his skull dropped back to the cell floor. He mumbled something incoherent and rolled onto his side. He laid there. Kakashi closed his eyes.

* * *

He didn't like the way his heart sped up when he finally managed to push himself onto his hands and knees, and the way that his blood seemed to boil in his veins when he moved, so Sasuke pressed his back to the wall and let his body sag and loll against it as he stared at the blankness on the backside of his lids. Was he supposed to stay like this, unmoving, until he was dead? He opened his eyes and made out, barely, the stone wall opposite him, and the heavy metal door beside him. He laughed abruptly, or meant to, but the action made him dizzy and his voice petered away into nothing. As if he needed four walls to hold him. They could release him into the middle of town and he wouldn't be able to do anything but lay in the middle of the street and stare up at a sky that looked only featureless and grey to his drugged eyes. They had him, and they still wanted more. _Information_, they said, _names_, but he knew they only wanted to hear him say one thing - Itachi is dead - and they wouldn't get the satisfaction of hearing it from his mouth.

Something blurred his eyes and he pressed his arm over them.

"Sasuke." The voice came like he was underwater and Kakashi was there, standing. He seemed infinitely tall and Sasuke couldn't look up at him for long; it made him dizzy. "You don't look too good."

There was a bubble of air in his throat that prevented him from answering. The blurring in his eyes... He pressed his hands to them.

"They aren't going to give you much time to talk to me," Kakashi said quietly. Sasuke sat haphazardly against the wall and his hands were clumsy against his hidden face; Kakashi wondered if he even understood the words he was speaking. From what he knew about the drug they'd given him, it circulated innocently through the system until met with chakra; then it was a poison affecting the heart, lungs, and brain. How much were they given him, that he couldn't even sit up without panting, without rolling his head in dizziness? "Sasuke," he said.

His voice was clearer to Sasuke's ears this time. He pressed the tears from his eyes and the floor beneath him was focused like it hadn't been in days. "Did you know," he managed, "about my brother?"

* * *

Aaugh, inertiaaa! My nemesis! It seems I have won but one battle, and you are always winning the war.

Thanks for the kind reviews, guys!


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